


Verdant Night and Unmet People

by theprophetlemonade



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: (they spend the entire fic drunk what can I say), 1920s, 1920s Party, Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Drug Use, Drunken Flirting, First Meetings, Gift Fic, Implied Sexual Content, JM Secret Santa 2017, JM!exchange challenge, Jazz era, JeanMarco Gift Exchange, M/M, Magical Realism, One Shot, Prohibition Era, alcohol use, background springles, background yumikuri, inspired by Great Gatsby (but not a Gatsby AU), jazz musicians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 20:47:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13131876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theprophetlemonade/pseuds/theprophetlemonade
Summary: It's the middle of the roaring twenties, Jean Kirschtein is a down-on-his-luck jazz pianist, and this is a night he will never forget.--In which Jean keeps running into a mysterious stranger over the course of one drunken night.





	Verdant Night and Unmet People

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maddaddam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maddaddam/gifts).



> Merry Christmas maddaddam! I’m your Secret Santa this year! :D You asked for “literally any historical AU” as your prompt, which, as I’m sure everyone can imagine, was TOO MUCH POWER FOR ONE PERSON. I had no fewer than 13 ideas within 5 seconds of reading the prompt, so that was a real doozy …
> 
> Eventually though, I settled on this … my historical knowledge is generally pretty limited to the World Wars, the interwar years, and the Cold War, so I felt it best to go with something I wasn’t completely in the dark about. I know you’re a fan of classical or medieval history but I fear that may have been a car crash for me, as I reckon my historical accuracy is out the window enough as it is in this one lol
> 
> Anyway! I hope you enjoy this nevertheless! I did have good fun writing it and it’s a stray away from my usual preference for aching and lingering slow burns. This is a story about chance meetings set over the course of one night, sprinkled with a little bit of is-it-or-is-it-not magical realism, and I hope I captured the transience and the fantasy of that drunken feeling. 
> 
> Obvious influences from both Fitzgerald himself and from the 2013 Gatsby movie. Less obvious influences from After Dark by Murakami and the title inspired by [this piece](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/semi-charmed-life) by Nathan Heller about the folly of being a twenty-something.
> 
> Here's a [playlist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmaKpp51uzI&list=PLMAgUdXzrEnOkyiLx4lTHtku9Rcae7C0M) I made for listening whilst you read. 
> 
> Please forgive any typos ... still gotta do a full proof, but I was desperate to get this up in time for Christmas (I'm a disaster human). For now, please enjoy "Jean and Sasha go on a drunken bender and sometimes Marco turns up".

 

 

 

 

> "You’re far from home. It’s quiet. All at once, you have a thrilling sense of nowness, of the sheer potential of a verdant night with all these unmet people in it. For a long time after that, you think you’ll never lose this life, those dreams. But that was, as they say, then."

\- Nathan Heller, _Semi-Charmed Life_ , The New Yorker (2011)

 

* * *

 

 

**SIXTHIRTYSIX**

 

The sun is low and watery through the passageways between skyscrapers, and collects the city dirt like lint. Through the window of the apartment, it’s already turning grey and polluted, not the sort of sunlight that Jean enjoys on his skin; he’s caught by the need to scrub it off.

 

Instead, he shifts in his armchair, angling his body away from the encroaching sunset; the old chair creaks and Jean lets slip a _tsk_. Elsewhere, a woman is humming about Avalon as she hurries between her dressing table and her closet, a powder puff in one hand, a tube of lipstick in the other. Beyond the window, New York’s streets play a refrain of car exhausts and taxi cab horns, the same tuneless melody in and out of every day, a crescendo as the sun sets and everyone is rushing home to get ready for a night out.

 

Jean has a newspaper in his hand, and he’s squinting against the dying sunlight to read the words on the page: _classified_. His other hand, he drums on his knee, muscle-memory playing scales on a piano that doesn’t exist.

 

_Hotel concierge staff needed. Eight dollars a week._

 

_He earns thirty dollars a week repairing autos - could this be you?_

 

_Wanted: a respectable young gentleman, about twenty four years of age -_

 

Next to those, some bell bottom in a uniform is pointing out of the page and advising him to sign up to the US Navy. Jean scoffs, tossing the newspaper onto the coffee table at his feet, an irritable itch in his fingertips.

 

He’s broke and it’s not a new development - more a current state of affairs, a very familiar purgatory of scraping to make ends meet. There’s no good money to be made on the whims of a piano, and whatever tip money he’s been making in these weeks of late has been blown on keeping himself fed in light of a rising inflation that everyone seems to be ignoring.

 

He fingers continue to play a piano tune on his knee; he fancies a cigarette, but he’s down to his last few and he knows he can’t afford another packet this week without lifting them from the newsagent on the corner of the street. The need for nicotine itches at the back of his throat, unsettling his nerves.

 

They probably made ten dollars between them this afternoon - Jean on the piano, Connie with his trumpet, and Sasha their centrepiece singer - and it was their only set this week. Jean will forever be haunted by the look on the manager’s face when he asked if they could play any Louis Armstrong. It hadn’t gone down well.

 

He’s already spent three of his three-and-a-third dollars on groceries, and the remaining dime and quarter have gone in the tip jar that Connie keeps on the mantelpiece in an old mason jar he once brewed moonshine in, back in college.

 

It’s looking a little sparse on the ground, Jean thinks, as he glances over. Seems like someone took out a loan for a bottle of whiskey.

 

He’s certainly not wrong.

 

“Jean!” Sasha crows, emerging from the bedroom with her hair in rollers and a smearing of red lipstick across her mouth. It doesn’t look like she’s changed her makeup since their afternoon set; merely, slathered on more over the top, to the extent that he eyelashes are a little clumpy. “Jean, you’re not even dressed yet! Don’t tell me you’re wearing _that_?”

 

He rolls his eyes and then glances down at his clothes: dark grey pants that have been rehemmed one too many times to still look neat, a waistcoat that’s just different enough in colour to clash, and a button-down that was certainly once white, although _now_ -

 

“I’m not going,” Jean shrugs.

 

Sasha practically gawps - and then she’s scrambling over the back of the sofa to grab something she’s got tucked away: a fistful of white envelopes, with which Jean has been made most familiar with in the past week.

 

“But we have invitations!” Sasha exclaims, shoving the white envelopes beneath his nose, so that he cannot choose to look away. His name is written in chicken scratch on the top one, and he doesn’t need to open it to know what the inside says.

 

He’s lived in New York for a while now - since just after the war ended - and there have been parties at the big house on the bay every weekend for almost as long. He’s been to parties like that in the city, in high rise lofts and in basement bars: he’s drunk himself stupid, and he’s mingled with social climbers and Wall Street buffoons and high schoolers out way past their bed times; he’s seen the fireworks and run with the fervour and danced until the sun rose again and his feet had blistered; and he certainly knows what it’s like to live from bottle to bottle, from party to party, with no destination and no in-between.

 

He’s not the naive and hedonistic and downright stupid nineteen year old kid who tossed his law degree to the wind in favour of pursuing dreams of music and spotlights and bohemia. He’s not the kid who would be swept up in the fantasy of Long Island nightlife, an obsession with the whiskey bottle and pretty skirts propelling him forward into ludicracy. And he’s not the kid who was blindsided by the harsh reality of truth: _his Great American dream is a lie_ , and he only wishes he’d known sooner, and not spent every last dollar in his pocket on trying to follow it into the sky.

 

In fact, he’s twenty-five and _exhausted_ . That’s all he is now. He glances side-long at the newspaper on the table top; the headline says: _welcome to the race, such a shame you forgot to start_. Or - it doesn’t actually say that, but that’s what it means.

 

He’s twenty-fucking-five and there are men his age earning eye-watering salaries on Wall Street, and he’s still scraping dimes off a dive bar floor. He feels lost, with no idea which way he’s supposed to run, only knowing that _run he must_.

 

“It’s not my scene anymore,” he says, “It’s all just -”

 

 _Too fake_ , he wants to say, but doesn’t. If he raises the point that no-one really needs an invitation to get into these sorts of parties, and it’s just Ymir’s way of buttering them up, he reckons it will be hastily ignored.

 

“A little party never hurt nobody!” Sasha insists, petulant. “Jean! You have to come!

 

It’s a conversation they’ve had many times, and it’s always the same. Just like the sheet music he gets handed by whatever blank-faced manager has decided to take pity on them and hire them for a set; just like every other damn kid Jean’s met with his head in the clouds and this unflappable ideal that music is all that matters; just like the way Sasha is always in a pretty dress, looking like she’s just stepped off a Broadway stage, and Jean is always in scraps, looking like he’s crawled up out of the gutter.

 

“Sash, c’mon. I’ve been sat at that God-damn piano playing those awful showtunes all day,” he grumbles. It’s the light version of the truth, but the one she’s most likely to listen to: their set today was long, maybe five or six hours, and they didn’t get a break. It’s been rubbing on Jean’s nerves all day. “My hands hurt, my head hurts, and heck - my ass hurts too.”

 

“And his ego hurts too!” Connie calls out, strolling from the bathroom to the bedroom, devoid of shirt but face swamped in shaving cream.

 

“You hate rag as much as I do!” Jean shouts back, but Connie just shrugs, disappearing in hunt of the rest of his patched-up suit. Jean grumbles, slumping back into the armchair, his nose scrunched up. Sasha fixes him with a flat glare as she crosses her arms across her chest, unimpressed.

 

“I know you don’t like what we play at the club, Jean,” she says pointedly, “You think I like singing it any more than you like playing? It’s a drag, and if it weren’t paying the bills, you know I’d blow outta there like a breezer.”

 

“I don’t think you can call this,” he says, gesturing at the room, “-paying the bills.”

 

As if to prove his point, someone stomping on the floor over knocks chalk from the ceiling, which falls to the floor in a puff of dust.

 

“Don’t-”

 

“Told you.”

 

“For Christ’s sake, Jean,” Sasha bemoans then, throwing her hands up and turning on her heels. She reaches for the dress thrown over the back of the moth-eaten couch, holding it up to the grubby light that comes in through the window, brushing off the lint with her fingers and clicking her tongue. She steps around the back of the paper screen in the corner, kicking off her shoes, which go flying into the underside of the lop-sided dining table awkwardly shoved against the wall.

 

Jean rolls his eyes; he supposes he can’t _just_ blame their wages on the state of the apartment.

 

He grabs the newspaper from the coffee table again, and his eyes flick back to the ads. He feels his heart fall in his chest, and maybe his soul begin to deflate too.

 

“You better not be looking at that paper again,” Sasha remarks from the other side of the screen.

 

“One of us needs a real job. As much as I hate this apartment, I can tell you now that sleeping on the streets will be worse.”

 

“You have a real job!” Sasha squawks, the top of her head appearing over the edge of the screen, set with a fierce frown. He doesn’t know if he’s jealous of her dedication to the dream still; she still believes it’s infallible. She still believes in the romance, and not the squalor. “We played at that jazz club on 67th the other week, didn’t we? You enjoyed that! And Ymir said she’d find us a regular thing at her place, one where there’s no ragtime in _sight_.”

 

She disappears again to the tell-tale sounds of someone wriggling into a very tight and unforgiving dress, and Jean sighs. He tosses the paper back onto the table but it skids off the other side, onto the floor. He doesn’t reach for it.

 

“That’s one job, Sash,” he says, a little softer. Distantly, he can hear Connie whistling, and so he sinks lower. “Getting to play the songs we like for just one job … I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore.”  

 

“Such is the life of a musician, Jean,” she replies. There’s a tone in her voice that might even be sympathetic. “We don’t do this because it’s easy. I’m not a singer because it’s easier, and you’re not a pianist because it’s easy. So what if we have to go through patches of-”

 

“Maybe I don’t want to be a damn dewdropper all my life, Sash.”

 

There’s a beat of silence, and Jean wonders if she may not have heard him. Connie’s stopped whistling, and the man upstairs has stopped stomping, and now Jean can hear the growl of traffic in the street, a roar and a rumble, a grey and sooty sound. That same sound has been seeping into his skin for some years now, to the point that he’s not sure it’s all marrow inside his bones anymore, and not smog.

 

He jumps out of his skin when Sasha flings her dress over the top of the screen.

 

“Applesauce, Jean!” she shouts, appearing with her hands on her hips, unapologetic in her corset and suspenders. “We’re not going to be stuck in these damn drums forever, you know that!”

 

“Sasha!” Jean yelps, shielding his eyes and trying desperately to turn away in his chair. “Connie! Tell your wife to put on some clothes!”

 

“I don’t tell her what to do, old boy,” comes Connie’s voice from elsewhere. Sasha quirks her eyebrow, unimpressed. Peeking through his fingers, Jean can’t help but cower.

 

“Our big break is coming, I can feel it,” she says, fiercely. “I know we had that thing with Eren stealing out slot the other week - and trust me, I’m going to smack him next time I see his lousy ass - but it’s not going to happen again.” Even in negligee, Jean can’t find himself able to doubt her when she speaks from the heart; she has a charisma that Jean has never seen matched, and he’s met a lot of loud and boisterous people in his line of work. It’s like when she sings, when she has a microphone cupped between the palms of her hands like a lover, and she has the crowd at her every beck and call, the rhythm of their feet something she composes.

 

“We’re gonna make something of ourselves, I _promise_ you.”

 

Jean doesn’t say anything, but he swallows thickly, and apparently that’s answer enough for Sasha. Severity is a strange look on her, so usually full of smiles and sparkles and exuberance enough to lift the roof from even the most dingy of New York bedsits, and Jean finds himself a little relieved when she slips behind the dressing screen once more.

 

He doesn’t know how to say that he doesn’t quite believe her; the words stick in his throat, just as dirty as the city smog that coats the window pane and probably every other surface in this damn apartment. He doesn’t know how to say that his mother would come back from the grave just to have another heart attack at the thought of him squandering his education on jazz music and seedy bars. He doesn’t know how to say that maybe, maybe the love of the piano just isn’t enough anymore, and this is him finally putting in the towel.

 

Reality doesn’t wait for everyone. Jean knows that; he sees the way their furniture is falling apart, and the way the radiators don’t stay all the way heated in the winter, and the way the three of them have to scrounge for tips every night after closing, just for enough money to get a cab across the city home.

 

Jean knows that they’re just one bad gig away from Connie having to sell his trumpet for dinner money, and he knows that playing another five hour shift of ragtime songs at some restaurant in a shitty basement is going to break a part of him that cannot be unbroken.

 

And Jean knows that he’s tired. He’s just tired. Tired of hopping from paycheck to paycheck; tired of feeling the passion seep from his fingers and into the cracks between keys on a piano; tired of struggling.

 

The thought of heading out into the night and drinking himself into a stupor isn’t some sort of liberation like it once was; it’s a brutal reminder that, when he wakes up, everything will be just as terrible and just as miserable, but he’ll just have a splitting hangover to match.

 

He’s tired of pretending it’s all going to work out fine. It’s a naive and childish wish, built up on boats of immigrants travelling across the sea in search of better lives, only for each and every one of the hopes to be dashed upon the ragged shores of the great American dream.

 

“I still haven’t heard a good reason as to why you’re not going tonight, by the way,” Sasha says then.

 

Jean sighs, despairing. She’s not going to listen to him today. He wonders if she’ll _ever_ listen.

 

“I’m _tired_ , like I said.”

 

“The whole damn world’s tired,” she replies, “It was a long war.”

 

“You’re twenty-two, you don’t get to talk like that.”

 

“And I still haven’t heard a good reason, Jean.”

 

He can hear the sing-song in her voice as he rolls his eyes, but his smile is dry and rueful. He resents the power she’s always had over him, an absolute thorn in his side, always doing horrible things to him, like reminding him what it’s like to live without consequence and making him feel a little less terrible.

 

“What’s a good reason, do you suppose?”

 

“There are no good reasons,” she says, “Only poor excuses. Forget about all that Jean, and just - let’s go have some fun tonight. The way you’re talking makes it sound like it might be the last chance we have. And if this is the end of the band, I’d rather we go out blind drunk.”

 

“Amen!” crows Connie from the other room.

 

“And,” she continues, rounding the corner of her screen and striking a pose: chin tilted up, hand on hip, leg cocked out and toe pointed; her body is painted in gold and crystal, layers upon layers of jewels, flaring out over her hips and rustling as she moves, absolutely decadent. Her dark hair is pinned to her head in pretty pin curls, scattered with tiny diamonds like dew drops, and a thin tiara stretches across her forehead, not quite as brilliant as the pearl-white smile she shoots Jean’s way. “This party, Jean, my darling, _is_ our first step towards success, whatever you might think. Anyone who is anyone goes to these things, and I do suppose that, tonight, that makes us _anyone_.”

 

Jean whistles a low note and she grins, spinning on her heel to give him a full view; she might just about fool someone into thinking she were a real dame, if they didn’t know any better.

 

Jean stands and reaches across to the couch, fetching her enormous white ostrich boa, which she accepts with a mischievous glint in her eye. She loops it around her bare shoulders, pouts her lips, and steps into his personal space with the sleek sort of grace she usually only reserves for the spotlight.

 

“Just think,” she purrs, and he knows she’s trying to get a rise out of him. “There’ll be movie stars there. Hollywood directors. _Music producers_ , Jean. I’m not naive, and I don’t want to be stuck in the speakeasies for the rest of my life either.”

 

“Ymir told me that the boss of a friend of a friend’s second cousin’s wife said that Herbert Berliner from Ajax Records is going to this shindig tonight,” Connie says, poking his head out of the bathroom, chin still covered in shaving foam that he hasn’t made any effort to remove yet. At least he’s acquired a shirt and a pair of worn-in suspenders. Sasha doesn’t even glance at him, but she nods approvingly, fixing Jean with an _I-dare-you_ sort of stare.

 

“Ymir can’t be trusted,” Jean mutters, but Sasha pinches him, and he yelps. “For crying out loud! Ow!”

 

Sasha pouts again, but it’s more a scowl this time as she glares up at Jean, defiant.

 

“You’re always getting in a lather about this stuff lately, Jean,” she says, “And I understand, I really do. But for once can we just go dancing and not have to worry about where our next paycheck is coming from? This isn’t going to last forever, I know that. But it’s happening right now, and I don’t want to miss out. Nor do you, not really. I _know_ you.”

 

He’s hard-pressed to argue, but there’s a part of him that says: _I don’t know_ what _I want anymore_ , and he’s doesn’t know how to ask Sasha how she can know him so well when he hardly knows himself.

 

This is a current, and he’s allowed himself to be swept up in it, without care for where he might be washed up one day. Not ‘til now, at least.

 

Sasha spins on her heel, striding over to the cabinet in the corner of the room where she grabs a decanter of whiskey and two glass tumblers that have seen better days. Jean takes one when she holds it out to him pointedly, and allows her to pour him a mouthful.

 

“Alright,” he says, low, caught on the way the whiskey splashes up the sides of his glass. “Alright, I’ll go.”

 

“Yes!” Sasha shouts, throwing her hands in the air and sloshing whiskey out of the open decanter and across the floor. “Connie, you hear?”

 

“Knew you were no killjoy, Jean!” Connie calls back, “Now you’re on the trolley!”

 

Jean smiles, a little tight. Sasha is exuberant, necking her drink and tossing the stoppered decanter onto the sofa with little care. She immediately starts shrieking about her shoes - which should she wear, the gold or the black, with the faux diamonds or the pearls - a whirlwind through the apartment. She makes a bee-line for their old gramophone, dusty in the corner, and winds it up: it croaks and sputters, but then there’s Kid Ory working his magic on a trombone, and her feet start tapping as she dances her way across the room.

 

Her excitement does not settle the swell in Jean’s chest. For a long moment, he looks down, considering the whiskey in his glass, swirling in a shallow vortex.

 

 _Just this one last time_ , he thinks _._ He knocks back the whiskey; reckons he’s going to need it, and need it bad. _Tomorrow, I think it’s time to stop putting the real world on hold._

 

* * *

 

**SEVENFIFTYONE**

 

The sun sets over the Queensborough bridge to the sound of car horns and trumpet horns alike, played with reckless abandon at fifty miles an hour. There’s gold spilling out across the river, and gold cresting on the waves in Sasha’s hair, moments of impossible fire that catch the light every time she moves. The hurtling city refracts in the bronze varnish of Connie’s trumpet, brought to his lips as he plays loudly, cheeks exerted red, no doubt infuriating the  cab driver.

 

There’s a bottle in Jean’s hand, wrapped up in a brown paper bag. He’s already had enough that he can’t quite tell what he’s drinking, the finer flavours lost on an already numbing tongue. He feels the buzz beginning to sweep through his veins with no preamble; it saturates his blood with music and fervour, until he can feel the brassy beat beneath his skin, and his feet are tapping in the back seat.

 

He takes another swig - beer he thinks, cheap beer, yes - and then Sasha’s snatching it out of his hand and passing it to Connie, who swaps the mouthpiece of his trumpet for the mouth of a bottle without taking a breath. Sasha tips the bottle higher; Connie splutters around a laugh, beer spewing out over his chin.

 

“Watch it,” warns the cab driver, but no-one really hears him around Sasha’s head-thrown-back laugh, and Connie blasting a blaring note on his trumpet once more.  

 

Jean scoffs, but it’s shallow laughter; he doesn’t feel it in his chest as he once did. He loves them both, he does, but it’s been a long time since he was on the same page.

 

It probably makes him a terrible person to be wanting something more than this: more than piling into the back of a cab and heading off to the same old party every weekend, just held in a different host-less house. It’s probably a selfish thought. The war left some people far worse off than them.

 

And yet, it’s still not enough. It’s all well and good, playing songs and writing songs, but what he wants - what he truly and irrevocably wants - is for something to happen to him that is worthy of a song. A magic moment, an epic romance, a collision with a stranger in the dark that knocks the first domino over in a chain reaction.

 

Are such things ever found in beer bottles wrapped in brown paper bags and backseats of cabs they smell distinctly of old sex and old tobacco alike? No. No, probably not.

 

New York rushes towards a rust-coloured horizon. From the bridge over the freeway, a sign for Long Island hangs, a gateway to freedoms for some, bad decisions for others.

 

* * *

 

**EIGHTTHIRTYTHREE**

 

“Come on, dig deep, Jean,” says Connie, already slurring his words. He has his trumpet tucked under one arm, and a bunch of crumpled ones in the cupped palms of his hand. Sasha is draped over the door of the taxi cab, sweet talking the driver with a fluttering of her eyelashes and her best charismatic smile; she dazzles, a vision in crystal and gold and the effortless sense of self of which Jean has always been envious.

 

Jean roots around in his pockets, and comes up with a handful of coins, much to Connie’s chagrin.

 

“That enough?” he asks, dropping the coins into Connie’s hands.

 

“It better be, or we’re gonna be making a run for it,” he remarks, glancing around. “Maybe one of these rich fellas would be willing to spare a couple of broke musicians a couple dollars, huh?”

 

Jean winces, shirking his shoulders, but no-one around them seems to hear - or take any notice of them really - already embroiled in joyous laughter, brimming with excitement, skips in their dandy steps as they make their way along the pebbled driveway to the house at the end of the road. And what a house! One hundred windows all lit up with a thousand twinkling lights; turrets that leap up into sunset-swallowed sky; alive with the tell-tale sounds of a party, jazz music, drunken laughter, the boisterous shouts of good friends who haven’t seen each other in so long. A huge and incoherent house, more a mirage drowned in golden light, attracting men and girls like moths to a flame.

 

A bright yellow breezer whirls past Jean and Connie, uprooting their hair and shirt collars; a woman dripping in diamonds throws her hands up in the air on the back seat, shrieking with intoxicated joy. Connie laughs brightly, and Jean feels a little breathless in a way he can’t quite explain.  

 

He almost chokes when Sasha flings her arm around his neck, hanging herself off his shoulders. She stinks of heavy perfume; he scrunches up his nose, arm immediately flying to her waist to hold her up off the ground.

 

“Boys,” she says dramatically, pulling them both in until the three of them are pressed temple to temple, “Are we ready to have a good time?”

 

Jean glances back over his shoulder at the taxi cab, but it’s already pulling away.

 

“What about-?”

 

“Don’t question my methods, Jean, my darling,” she smiles wickedly. Pulling away, she loops her arm with Connie’s, and then the other with Jean’s. He can feel the energy bristling beneath her skin, electric. “What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Now! Let’s walk!”

 

They come across an enormous fountain, opalescent in white marble, spurting jets of water high into the air; the dying sunset refracts through the spray, moments of liquid gold and topaz setting the water alight where a man and a woman, up to their knees, kick and splash one another, amassed in fervent giggles.

 

Connie whoops and cheers, and Sasha yanks harder on both their arms, dragging them onwards, towards the carnival of the house, lit up like the World Fair. A kaleidoscope of colour spills from the doors flung open, everyone from every walk of life, every corner of New York City, brimming with approaching hysteria.

 

Jean can taste it in the air: beneath the smell of salt water drifting in from the bay, there's the cheap liquor, the loose morals, the lure for the young and ambitious, buoyed by the great American dream and paralysed by happiness. It’s like an outstretched finger curling inwards, beckoning: _come in, come in and drink some_.

 

So many people, blown in by the wind, desperately chasing the high of a good time - and Jean feels himself shrinking back against it, against the extravagant, brilliant chaos, casting a long shadow down the drive behind him. Sasha tightens her link on his arm, ecstasy in her dark eyes, twinkling with the same magnificence as the string of white jewels looped around and around her neck, pooling in the valley of her breasts.

 

“It looks like Coney Island!” Jean says against Sasha’s ear, straining to be heard over the crescendo sound of a pipe organ, blaring out from somewhere inside, deep and stomping. “What’s the point of all this?”

 

“The point is whatever you make of it, Jean!” Sasha laughs, delighted. “The point is to make new friends! The point is to get so rip-roaringly drunk that you can hardly stand! The point is to feel the _music_!”

 

She rushes forwards, and Jean almost trips; the boa draped over her shoulders flares out like wings, taking flight as she scampers up the stairs. A group of Wall Street types sharing cigars to the side give her a low whistle, and she laughs some more, twirling on her heel and blowing them all a kiss from her palm.

 

Jean shoots them the stink eye, but none of them seem to care for him. They’re all debonair-handsome, but not for him to look at. He’s not surprised; he doesn’t steal spotlights on the regular.

 

The house looms over them, imposing and spectacular, light and music seeping from its every window, thrown open to the warm night air. Curtains dance whimsical and magical in the breeze, great sleeves of alabaster cotton billowing out into the night like pretty women tossing favours, in contrast to the way gold light hemorrhages from behind and the massive glass doors bleed people, rivers of laughter thundering down the steps towards them.

 

Jean sucks in a deep and steadying breath and summons all the willpower he can muster. It isn’t much.

 

* * *

 

**EIGHTFIFTYEIGHT**

 

“Champagne!” Sasha crows, three tall glasses clutched in her hands, close against her chest, weaving her way through the crowd, desperate not to spill a drop. There’s confetti in her hair and falling from her boa; above, a girl in a leotard encrusted with rubies hangs upside down from a chandelier, swinging back and forth, tossing handfuls of glitter over the crowd. The shimmers, gold and silver and iridescent.

 

A glass is thrust into Jean’s hand, and the base pressed upwards, forcing him to drink. The bubbles go straight up his nose, and he snorts.

 

“This is amazing!” Connie shouts around a grin, voice lost to the din of jazz music, a cacophony of violins and bass and drumbeat, rummaging around inside Jean’s head, beating him something senseless. There’s Charleston on the dance floor, arms flailing wild, legs kicking out, broad and bright smiles that light up the night. Waiters duck and dive through the throng, balancing martini glasses on silver platters like circus artists, not spilling a drop, whirling out of the way on nimble feet of drunk men trying to find purchase in shoulders to keep them off the floor.

 

Someone knocks into Jean’s back, pushing past him like he’s not even there, and almost knocks him from his feet; a bruise blooms on his hip where he makes contact with a sharp elbow. He’s inconsequential here. He’s inconsequential everywhere. No-one of importance. The dour feeling in his chest continues to simper. He whirls around, a scowl on his face, sharp words poised upon his tongue, but the crowd has already moved on, people bowing out immediately replaced by those more drunk.

 

A girl in a slinky blue dress and an enormous, feathered fan in her hands looks at him coyly beneath her eyelashes, mouthing something he can’t make out. He scowls, ducks his head, and by the time he looks up again, she’s moved on to throw flirty glances at another man, her body pressed up close, hips moving to the swing of a piano.

 

This is not the place to be when sober. He’s tossed and turned by the current of bodies thundering over waterfalls into drunken pleasure, twirling in careless circles, stepping on feet, and ruffling Jean up the wrong way. A waiter with a silver tray swoops past; Jean grabs another two glasses of fizz and downs them both, spluttering afterwards, a messy sight.

 

“Attaboy!” Sasha chimes, “Let’s get you another! And then we dance!”

 

He slams back another champagne, and is then handed something that smells violently like petrol by a man he has never met. It tastes foul but it hits the spot, rushing straight to his head. The giddy laughter comes next, bouncing around inside his skull. There’s a band on a stage in the centre of the pool, a cellist covered in party streamers, a pianist in a fez, and a singer who seems confused which is a microphone and which is a litre bottle of whiskey. They start up a sloppy Charleston and Sasha laughs merrily, clapping her hands together in excitement and then holding her palms out, one for Jean and one for Connie.

 

And Jean is no Oliver Twist - he has two left feet and tends to make the music, not move to it - but he can be a fool for her and her flapper smile and glitter-encrusted eyelashes.

 

It’s easy to pretend. That’s what they all are: _young pretenders_ , some of them so good at playing the fool that they’ve lost touch with all reality.

 

 _What’s one more night_ , the booze is saying. _What’s one more night just to forget?_

 

It’s sound advice. New York City is in the grips of an identity crisis. The only cure Jean knows, the only cure _they all know_ , all these young people with no idea when their feet will next touch the ground, is to get rip-roaringly drunk.

 

* * *

 

**NINEFORTYEIGHT**

 

“Ymir!” Connie hollers down the length of the bar swarming with people. Ymir is down the far end, leant forwards on her folded arms, flirting shamelessly with a pair of pretty flapper girls, dripping jewels and dripping smiles. Jean weasels his way in-between the shoulders of two men in double-breasted suits and fedora hats, sucking in his breath to make himself as small as possible, grateful when he finds one hand worth of purchase on the edge of the bar; he all but collapses against it, his feet aching something terrible, burning hot in his heels. He’s not sure how long they’ve been dancing - it’s impossible to know when one song just blurs into another, an endless tirade of music that never relents, only forcing one to dance faster and drink stronger.

 

 _What time is it?_ he wonders vaguely, but an hour is an abstract concept to him now, especially in the pitch black of night where there’s no sun to mark the passage of time and all the stars are hidden beyond New York City smog. He wouldn’t be all that surprised if time itself has ceased to exist altogether, another fragment of reality made obsolete by hedonistic need.

 

“Ymir, you cad!” Connie shouts again, pushing up on his toes to lean over the bar, grabbing the first bottle that he can reach from the other side. It’s green and sickening-looking, and Jean immediately blanches as Connie reaches over again for a pair of glasses. “I’m taking this, Ymir!”

 

“I hear ya’ Springer, you old _pill_ !” Ymir calls back. She leans into one of the girls she’s chatting up, whispering something undoubtedly sordid into her ear, which makes her giggle; Ymir’s answering grin is wolf-like, predatory and dangerous, and if Jean didn’t already know her, he wouldn’t be pressed to describe her most frightening person he’d ever seen. Hell, he would _still_ describe her that way, and they go back far too many years than they’d both dare admit.

 

The girls flit away, preening and prancing their way back into the pulsing crowd, and then Ymir turns on her heels, striding quickly towards Connie and Jean, deliberately ignoring the men divested of their waistcoats who hang and drape themselves over the bar, trying to win her attention.

 

She’s more dressed-to-the-nines than Jean thinks he’s ever seen her: white button-up shirt, rolled up about the elbows, grey slacks fitted around her hips, and a matching grey waistcoat cutting a sleek and sharp figure, more dandy than any of these Wall Street types with dollar bills spilling from their jacket pockets.

 

And maybe a couple people turn and sneer at her, but when she’s providing half of New York with free liquor, Jean supposes most people can overlook a woman out of skirts. Since the war, it’s hardly been uncommon, Jean reasons. And Hell, he’d probably be more off-put to see Ymir draped in gold chains and ostrich feathers, and giggling demurely behind a martini glass.

 

“I’d ask you if you see something you like, Kirschtein, but we both know that I’m not flattered, and you definitely ain’t interested.” She grins devilishly, and reaches out to muse her hand through Jean’s carefully gelled-back hair. Jean scowls, smacking her hand away, and she cackles.

 

“Ymir, dry up,” he hisses, casting a wary look around, but no-one has a care in the world for him, the music too addicting, and alcohol to intoxicating. There must be a hundred people pushed up against him, but not one of them would know he was here.

 

It makes him feel insignificant, and he both hates and depends on that.

 

Ymir turns her attention to the bottle in Connie’s hands then, frowning and ducking below the bar to grab another glass.

 

“If you’re really drinking that, best pour me one too,” she announces, sliding her glass beneath the mouth of the bottle. Connie’s pours out three shots of syrupy, green liquor; Jean gags at the sight alone.

 

“No upchucking on my bar, Jean,” Ymir warns. “Get this down you and you’ll be feeling much better. It’ll loosen you up a bit. Have a bit of fun, because this-” She gestures in a circular motion at his face. “Definitely looks like you’ve been sucking on a bunch of sour grapes, old boy.”

 

Jean squints at his shot glass.

 

“Somehow, I doubt this is going to taste any better.”

 

The three of them tap their glasses together, and then throw the alcohol down their throats, the burn absolutely vile - or so Jean believes, scrunching his face up and near choking as he slams his empty glass back on the bar.

 

Ymir whistles loudly, and Connie blinks his eyes rapidly, lips puckered in a expression like he’s just bitten into half a lemon.

 

“God, that tastes like coffin varnish,” Ymir remarks, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. Immediately, she pours herself another, and necks that too. She points the bottle in jean’s direction, but he holds up a hand and shakes his head. She reaches back, and grabs a martini glass from a silver tray waiting to be taking out on the floor, and pushes it into Jean’s hand instead.

 

“Thanks,” he says, flat, but he drinks it anyway, because if there’s one cure for feeling alone and moderately embarrassed at a party, it’s to get roaring drunk. Or so Sasha says.

 

“Glad you boys could make it,” she says, grabbing a cocktail shaker and a mix of bottles from the back shelf. She flips one up in the air and catches it with ease, before pouring a generous amount into the shaker; she second, she uncaps with her teeth, and takes a swig, grimacing, before tossing the empty bottle over her shoulder. “‘Specially you, Jean. Never see you outside of the clubs. Didn’t think they’d get you to come.”

 

“You make me sound like I’m some grouch.”

 

Ymir raises her eyebrows.

 

“You’re not?”

 

“Oh, dry up,” Jean grumbles. “This is just - it’s not my scene anymore, I don’t know. I’m almost _thirty_ , Ymir, I can’t just -”

 

“God, anyone ever told you you’re a killjoy?” Ymir groans.

 

“Yep,” Connie pipes up, “Earlier this afternoon, in fact.” He fixes Jean with an I-told-you-so look, and Jean rolls his eyes with a despairing scoff.

 

“Can it,” Jean sighs, reaching for another martini. He takes a gulp, swirls it around in his mouth; it tastes a little less sharp this time around. “Don’t you guys ever just -”

 

“Want to drink myself under the table?” Connie asks. “Yes?”

 

“- I was going to say: _want there to be something more than this_. But, what have you.”

 

“Why would you want more than this?” Connie exclaims, throwing his hands high, almost smacking someone in the face with his trumpet, which he has somehow managed to hold on to. “This is amazing! This is New York, Jean! Paradise!”

 

Jean stares down into his glass quite fiercely. When he chances a look back up, Ymir is watching him with a curious expression.

 

“What is that you want, Jean?” she asks.

 

He doesn’t know how to answer that. He hasn’t known for years, he supposes. It’s an impossible thing, describing something that you need, when you’re not even sure why you need it.

 

He also knows it must be selfish. The war’s only been over a couple years, and he remembers vividly how it was before: playing the same old, dusty songs at a restaurant in a crumbling basement on a hundred-and-fourth, Sasha crooning on about boyfriends away in the trenches of Europe. There was a point in time where they were wondering if Connie

would come home, insufferable idiot that he is.

 

That was a different lifetime. Before the drinking-til-dawn, the chasing of the high, and the jazz. God, the _jazz_.

 

Jean should be happy. He should be happy that they now have this … _freedom_.

 

Still, it’s not enough.

 

“I don’t know,” is what he says. Ymir’s mouth makes a thin, taut line, but then her gaze shifts to something over Jean’s shoulders, and she nods.

 

“Do you know who that is? Over there, in the white dress and the gloves?”

 

Jean and Connie both turn back to look, scanning the vibrating crowd for someone who matches Ymir’s description. Connie spots her first, and gasps.

 

“Oh my God!” he exclaims. “That’s not-?”

 

Ymir exhales heavily, resting her chin on her palm. Someone tries to flag her down for a drink, but she slaps them away, and returns her gaze to the woman in the crowd.

 

“It absolutely is,” she says, and there’s an edge to her voice that Jean has not heard before. If it didn’t absolutely guarantee her chewing him out, he would tease her for it. “Krista Lenz, the one and only.”

 

“Christ, where’s Sasha got to?” Connie asks, “She’s _obsessed_ with her movies, I have to -”

 

Jean spots her then, _Krista Lenz_ , and he’s sat with Sasha at the pictures enough times to know who she is. She’s a vision in white, a sleek, silver dress painted on her slender frame, ostrich feathers around her wrists and hemline. There’s a silver band across her forehead, dripping diamonds, and an enormous white flume spouts from one side, dusted with something adularescence that catches the light and looks a million dollars.

 

She’s sat a little way away from the dancing, up on a balcony, surrounded by young men in suits and fly boys in their uniforms, all trying to catch her attention with charming smiles and lighters in their hands for every time she wants to light up. Her golden hair curls around her ears in soft waves; something shimmers on her eyelids; she scans the party with a look almost sleepy, cool, disinterested in a way that makes Jean wonder if she wants to be anywhere but here.

 

“Look at all those damn cads,” Ymir remarks, “Think they have a fucking chance with her.”

 

Krista twirls the string of diamonds around her neck between her fingers, absolutely blasé as some man in a stetson braves approaching her, a tentative smile on his face, trying his luck. She offers him a polite smile, but even from across the crowd, Jean can see it doesn’t reach her eyes, and whatever words she gives her admirer are no better than a cold shoulder. The man in the stetson backs off with an apologetic smile, and Krista picks up her cigarette holder from her table, tapping it on an ashtrash, before slipping it between her lips. In a flash, every member of her entourage is holding out a lighter, but she doesn’t blind as she lights up and takes a long, heavy puff.

 

“God, she’s a doll,” Ymir sighs, and Connie snorts with laughter.  

 

“Such a struggle,” he laughs, a little tipsy already. “That Hollywood starlet life. So many admirers, so little time.”

 

“She looks like she’d rather be anywhere but here,” Jean remarks dryly.

 

“When you’re that famous, you don’t come to these sorts of things because you want to,” Connie says, leaning into Jean’s side. “You become because everyone _expects_ you to come. These things are always a who's-who!”

 

“Sounds miserable,” says Jean. He tips the rest of his martini down his throat, but doesn’t really taste it.  

 

“That’s why I’m here,” Ymir then says, looking Jean in the eye. “Well, that, and the job I have lined up for later, but mainly that.” Her eyes flick back to Krista, and something flashes therein, daring and brazen, and Jean would expect little else. She tilts her chin in Krista’s direction, and a smile curls dangerously at her lips. “She just hasn’t met me yet.”

 

“Aiming high there, Ymir,” Jean says.

 

“Stratospheric,” Connie agrees, with a nod.

 

“To Hell with you both!” Ymir snaps. She grabs the bottle of green liquor again, and fills up their shot glasses, still sticky with residue. “I’ll have those invitations back, you pair of fucking Reubens.”

 

Connie cackles and slams back his shot, but Jean turns back to look at Krista, a tilt to his head as he considers her. There’s a warmth brewing in his temples and his fingers twitch and his foot taps along to the hum of the double pass and the vibrato of the piano, and he cannot help any of it. He makes the mistake of sipping from his glass, which only makes the taste all the worse; he gags, and it’s at that moment that Krista, in her searching of the crowd, lets her blue eyes fall on him.

 

It lasts only a moment, but Jean is caught, suspended, by the diamond-like clarity of her gaze. He sways a little on his feet, but Krista’s eyes move on, drifting upwards to the woman who still dangles artfully from the chandelier, neck thrown back in a fine arch as she tips an entire bottle of champagne into her mouth and down her cleavage.

 

“I don’t know what Great American Dream you’ve fooled yourself into chasing, Jean,” Ymir says then. She leans across the bar, curling her hand around the back of Jean’s neck, and draws him close, knocking her forward against his, and hopefully some sense too. “But you’re not gonna find what you’re looking for moping around at home. Or moping around at a bar either, for that matter.”

 

Jean opens his mouth to reply - as to what, he doesn’t yet know - but he’s interrupted by someone colliding with his back, accompanied by a high-pitched screech. He surges forward, the edge of the bar winding him in the ribs, but then there are arms curling around his neck, tugging him backwards into an over-affectionate, slobbery hug.

 

“Jean!” Sasha sing-songs; Jean is overcome by the fruity smell of her perfume, and tries to crane his head away. Ymir quietly slides another martini his way, which he eyes suspiciously, but necks when he spots Connie eyeing it up.

 

“That’s the spirit!” Sasha beams, too loud in Jean’s ear, her words slipping and sliding all over the place. Her lipstick has rubbed away, and now her mouth is stained the colour of cocktails. “I knew you’d have fun!”

 

“So much fun,” Jean says, rolling his eyes, but he feels a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, one he cannot suppress. He tries his best to hide it behind the rim of his glass; Ymir watches him knowingly, as if she can see straight through his skin to wear the liquor warmth is radiating outwards, starting hot in his chest, becoming a tingle by the time it reaches his fingers and toes.

 

Whatever the band is playing - Jean doesn’t know it, too many flavours of swing and orchestra - comes to an end, and everyone at the bar turns and raises their hands in applause.

 

“Connie, do you still have your trumpet?” Sasha asks then, hooking her chin over Jean’s shoulder. Connie brandishes his trumpet like it’s another bottle of absinthe, thrusting it up into the air as everyone around them continues to whoop and holler. “Okay!”

 

She detangles herself from Jean and spins him by the shoulders to face her, and Jean has seen the makings of a plan in her expression before, too many times to count.

 

“Jean,” she says, with a telling smile. She flutters her lashes dramatically.

 

“What,” he says, deadpan.

 

“There’s a piano over there with your name on it,” she says, deviously. Jean glances over her shoulder, and sure enough, the pianist who was on the stage in the centre of the swimming pool is gone, and the band - if they were even a band, and not just an ensemble of varyingly drunk individuals pushed together by a want to try their hand at the double bass or saxophone - is packing up.

 

Connie slams his empty shot glass down hard on the bar, pulls his trumpet to his lips, and blasts a squawking note that makes everyone around them jump - and then cheer, parting to make way for him as he pushes towards the stage, not waiting or Jean or Sasha.

 

“It’s not my piano!” Jean shouts back over the roar of the party, but it’s a weak excuse, and Sasha knows it. She takes him by the hand, squeezing his fingers in her palm.

 

“Not my microphone either,” she grins, “But I do believe these lovely people deserve to hear me sing!”

 

She yanks him forward into the crowd, and he’s been standing still at the bar too long; the world trips head over heels, someone pulls the rug of the earth from out beneath his feet, and everything is topsy turvy for a moment. People are shrieking, clapping, beating their feet against the floor; the organ is still playing, somewhere else, loud and booming and choralic, and there’s someone in the crowd with a saxophone too, jamming out to their own rhythm.

 

He’s shoved onto the piano stool before he can protest, and almost falls straight off the other side. Sasha throws her head back and laughs, but she’s suddenly got a microphone in her hand, summoned out of thin air. She’s grinning some Cheshire Cat grin, and from the way her lips turn upwards, Jean knows the song she wants him to play.

 

* * *

 

**TENTHIRTEEN**

 

Confetti spirals through the air, tangling in Jean’s hair and catching on his eyelashes. The ivory beneath his fingertips glistens; the broad expanse of the piano’s back, all sleek and black and shiny, glints with a holographic wink. Ice clinks in glasses and strangers press up against each other, shoulder to shoulder, breast to breast, encroaching upon each other’s laughter and the air Jean tries to breathe; someone collides into his back, and he lurches against the piano keys, his palm coming down hard on the chord, but the music keeps playing, haphazard and carefree.

 

His fingers haven’t stopped moving and the song hasn’t stopped playing, careening and caterwauling into something new and different with every other bar, not the same piece of music it was when it started. His fingers are aching, and he’s sure his ass has gone numb, and there’s sweat, he thinks, clinging to his forehead.

 

Jazz doesn’t soar and fly like symphonies; it hums its opening line, and then it rambles, it improvises, it’s the most verbose form of music, always with so much to say. It’s freedom in its rawest form, gobbling up time and sense, until Jean doesn’t know how long he’s been playing or where he’s playing to.

 

This is what he loves. He doesn’t want the song to end. If there’s no refrain, if the song just keeps climbing and climbing, and rising and falling, and wandering off into the opiate night, it doesn’t have to end, does it?

 

Sasha laughs, and pulls herself up onto the back of the piano, her heels clicking on the black ebony. She calls for Connie amidst an iridescent smile, and pulls him up to join her, his trumpet too; Jean grins up at them, towering high above him, swinging each other around with arms around waists and feet barely on the ground and cackling with the most electric sort of hedonism.

 

The music erupts from Jean’s fingers, unpracticed and untested but raw and true and effervescent, running along a knife edge and tripping and stumbling here and there, each note bounces into the next.

 

He looks up, a fleeting glance through Connie and Sasha’s legs, and catches the eyes of a voyeur on the other side of the piano: ink-black hair parted down the middle, dark eyes like whiskey, and a soft, round mouth. Jean’s not quite sure if it’s freckles that dust his cheeks or glitter. He doesn’t blink; Jean ducks his head, focus back on the keys, a surprised warmth in his cheeks that tingles with the near-kiss of alcohol. He smiles a goofy smile and chances another look; the stranger is still watching, enraptured.

 

Bright and scattered light flashes over the man’s features, pearl white and blue, but it doesn’t soften the sharp and sudden look it his eyes. He seems transfixed by the music, by the _jazz_ , by the eclectic litany of Jean’s fingers running laps of the piano keys.

 

Connie dips Sasha by the waist, right down low, her hair already coming loose from her finger waves and nearly brushing the piano top; Jean’s line of sight is obscured for a moment amidst epiphanic laughter, and his breath catches; he misses a note; no-one notices.

 

“Jean, Jean!” Sasha cajoles, fluttering her fingers in front of his face, “Play something faster!”

 

Faster, yes. His fingers take off on their own accord, leaping into something manic, something frantic. His head swims. _Giddy_. He finds the eyes of the stranger again as Connie lifts Sasha back up and twirls her around and around and around in dizzying circles.

 

The man is smiling now, the slight widening of his eyes and slow curling of his lips taking over his face like magic.

 

 _Hello there_ , his eyes are saying. Excitement reigns, singing of fast motorcars and bottle rockets and diamante beneath bright lights. Something ignites in the pit of Jean’s stomach: the need to impress.

 

Jean picks up the pace; he can play faster still. People are cheering. Someone slaps him heartily between the shoulder blades, and he grins, jolting over another duff note. The man’s smile broadens, catching in his eyes. Jean changes the tune again, fingers scampering scales across the keys, rapid-fire bullet-fire. The man laughs, thrilled. Jean feels the electric surge of self-satisfaction.

 

All too quickly, it becomes call-and-repeat, a cat-and-mouse game: Jean shakes up the tune, the man smiles, his eyes alive. He plays higher, lower, louder, quieter; the piano arches against his nimble fingers, desperately chasing the sort of benediction only otherwise found between sheets. The stranger remains fascinated; he bites his lip; Jean feels sweat on the back of his neck.

 

Alcohol numbs his senses and emboldens his fingers. He finds himself inspired. The crowd surges around the stranger, aroused and pulsating, but Jean can’t stop looking at him, and he doesn’t know why.

 

 _Magnetic_. Jean is surrounded on all sides by drunken euphoria and streaming light and chaos, but he plays for an audience of one

 

The man tilts his head, a half-nod, flirtatious perhaps for the way Jean’s heart feels tight in the cage of his chest, squashed from all sides. _I like your playing_ , he says, without saying.

 

 _Thank you_ , Jean replies with his eyes, a coy flicker down to the keys and then back up again, his gaze dark but his breath fast; he feels like he’s running fast, and only wants to go faster.

 

He pushes and the piano gives beneath him, a eloquent and fervoured lover, body reacting to the path of his fingers. The music erupts around the shriek of Connie’s trumpet.

 

“Yes, Jean!” Sasha cackles, somewhere high above. She’s not even singing anymore, but her laughter is music enough, joyful and drunken. He doesn’t even spare her a second.

 

The man stands on the other side of the piano now, fingers curled over her back. There’s this strange balance to his expression: an endearing delight and a piercing severity, so intense that Jean finds himself wondering if he’s gone see-through, and the man is focused on something on the other side of his ribcage.

 

He watches Jean like there’s no-one more in the world that he wanted to see, and he finds himself a man with one of those three-second crushes: the sort where you believe it utterly possible to fall in devastating love with a stranger on the opposite subway platform, despite having never exchanged a word.

 

It thrills him; it’s the sort of high that doesn’t leave him stupored and loose-lipped and liable to foolish mistakes.

 

He changes the song mid-bar; he plays the Louis Armstrong that was so rudely denied from him. The man across the piano smiles knowingly, a secret shared.

 

* * *

 

**TENTHIRTYNINE**

 

He’s spinning; the room is spinning; the whole world, in the palm of his hand is spinning. Someone bumps into his back, an apologetic hand pressed between his shoulder blades quickly moving on; the vodka in his glass spills out over his fingers, cold where the air mingles with the alcohol in cheerful conversation. The back of his throat is burning with something addictive, something hearty, and he chases it with another glasses tipped back - the flash fire of liquor tingles in his nostrils this time, a heady heat simmering somewhere in his heart.

 

The music clamours, a double bass making the floor feel like it's vibrating beneath Jean’s feet, and a trumpet and a saxophone warring for the loudest note somewhere above, high up on stages or balconies or perhaps hanging from chandeliers - Jean cannot say. The music consumes him, everywhere at once, loud and encompassing, swallowing up every other sense until there is nothing he can feel but the beat rummaging through his veins, soaked in alcoholic warmth.

 

A man in an expensive suit and wide-brimmed hat rolls a pair of dice on a roulette table and scores big. An older lady with silver-grey hair, draped in red fur and jewels out of another century parts the swarm of people at the bar with one look and a gaggle of younger men nipping at her heels. An army officer in his dress greens regales a gaggle of onlookers with gallant tales from the war, exaggerated by the scotch in his glass that he waves around dramatically.

 

A woman with viridian-green eyes and a boomerang smile leans into Jean from out of the crowd, pinching his cheeks between the flats of her palms, her long nails biting at his skin, and kisses him messily on the mouth,leaving behind a smear of red lipstick. She grins when she pulls back, and Jean grins too, a thrill shooting down his spine.

 

A man swings his arm around Jean’s neck, knocking his head against Jean’s to whisper something sordid and slurred in his ear as the woman weaves her way like a ribbon back into the pulsing crowd - his prickled jaw is rough against Jean’s own, and that’s a rush too, the sharpness and the coarseness of it, just the same. Tension coils in Jean’s gut, an illicit acceleration that feels like it’s building, and building more, a feeling possessing him that just keeps growing.

 

Sasha pulls him into the hold of a foxtrot, even though the beat is wrong and the music is far too staccato for that, scatting and jiving all over the place, ecclectric and unpredictable. She swings him around and around, seizing the lead, and Jean barely stays upright. A laugh is pulled from his throat on the end of a fishing line, almost choking him on its way up. When Sasha grins, her eyes light up, reflections of gold dancing there, opulent and brilliant.

 

 _I knew you’d have fun,_ her eyes are saying, goading, almost. Jean laughs again, shaking his head in answer to a question not asked. He dips her, and she shrieks, all giddy like, but she’s wrong too.

 

It’s not about fun, this hedonism. It’s about escape. It’s about melting into a bead of whiskey. The narrow, smelly streets of New York are far away; the memory of the war further still. Jean is no-one here, and that’s the beauty and the tragedy of it, a perfect balance of relief and hurt. He is no longer himself, a man out-of-body and out-of-place, running on the fuel of hard liquor and the fire sparked by the suggestive glances of strangers that will lead nowhere, not after this night.

 

He’s a puppet of the vodka wince and the close compress of white-hot bodies and the inescapable need to move his feet to the sound of a pianist pouring his soul out onto a keyboard. No-one cares who he is. People will remember the clink of glasses and the flutter of eyelashes and the gold streamers pouring from the ceiling; people will remember the menagerie, the decadence, the chaos of it all when they look back with fond but aching nostalgia on one night of reckless partying, but they won’t remember him there.

 

It’s a feeling he doesn’t know how to place. He’s too drunk to place it too; it’s an abstract thing, swirling around and about inside his head, intangible, slipping through the cracks of where he tries to grab it and focus, a spillage of strange colour.

 

That tension in his gut is a crescendo. It’s getting tighter; it’s getting louder, as if he can hear a thundering white noise in his ears. His head is pounding. He’s overcome by this want to plunge ten fingers into his ribcage and rip open his chest then and there, and let it all explode outwards, like a firework.

 

That’s the treachery of alcohol and the debonair - the manic intensity that suddenly fills him from every pore, and drives him mad with the wants to pull himself apart and scatter his pieces into the air as star-reflecting shards. He swears he can feels everything there is to feel; everything that matters. The entire universe is only this moment of time, compressed down and down and down into this one second.

 

A saxophone bellows in his ear, a fog horn of sorts, and Sasha yanks him out of his reverie with a fist in the neck of his shirt.

 

“Jean!” she hisses. She sways before his eyes, slightly out of focus, fuzzy around the edges - or maybe those are just her fly-aways, Jean cannot truly tell.

 

“What?” he hisses back, ridiculous. Sasha moves her eyes over his shoulder, and then back to his face, deliberately: _look over there but don’t let it look like you’re looking_.

 

“It’s _Eren_ ,” she says, scandalised. “What the Hell is he doing here, Jean? We’re here!”

 

Jean wants to say something smart about the fact it’s a big city and a big party and they don’t get to control who comes and goes - but he also _hates Eren Jaeger_. Well - hate is a strong word and perhaps it’s not quite right. Irrevocable distrust and extreme annoyance, topped with a cherry of embittered jealousy? Sure.

 

“I still haven’t forgiven him for stealing the headline slot from us at that speakeasy down by  that bar on Rose,” Sasha grumbles, against Jean’s ear. Her words are slurring into an incoherent mess. She tugs hard on Jean’s shirt, unaware of her own strength. “Fuck that guy! Fuck him!”

 

“He only got that because of Mikasa,” Jean agrees, sneering. “He’s not even that good at the saxophone. She’s the star, not him - _oh shit_.”

 

“What, what?” Sasha asks, craning her head to look back into the crowd, “Wha - _oh fuck_!”

 

She swears so loudly that a couple of people less drunk than her look at her funny, but no-one is staring as hard as Eren Jaeger, shoving his way through the crowd. The look on his face is always like a tempest, some endless, violent bluster in his eyes, however broad his grin might be. He’s wearing a grin now. He looks like he’s been necking a bottle of vodka. His face is flushed and he’s laughing.

 

Jean is struck with the inconsolable need to punch him. If he had another whiskey in his belly, he probably wouldn’t hold back.

 

“Guys!” he greets them cheerily, a hand on Jean’s shoulder, a hand on Sasha’s shoulder. Sasha mimes throwing up; Jean snorts. “I didn’t know you’d be here! Why didn’t you say, we could’ve got a cab together from midtown!”

 

“Didn’t know we were coming ‘til the last minute,” Sasha smiles appeasingly, although it is a mile away from reaching her eyes. “Too busy trying to scrape together a new gig after you stole that one from us the other day. _So sorry_.”

 

“Sash,” Jean warns.

 

“It’s true,” she replies, nose in the air.

 

“Hey, come on now,” Eren grins, completely oblivious. “All’s fair in love and war, right? You guys had your eye off the ball, it’s not my fault they asked us instead.”

 

“We absolutely did not!” Sasha huffs, stabbing Eren in the chest with her pointer finger. “You just - you’re just a pincher! A lousy, no-good, horrible _pincher_!”

 

She staggers forward a little bit, and both Jean and Eren reach out to keep her from falling forward.

 

“Careful, Sash,” Eren laughs as she shoves away from him with a pointed huff.

 

“ _Pincher_!”

 

It’s testament to the amount of alcohol in his blood that his mood can change so quickly - or perhaps Jean just blinks and misses it. He can’t be sure. He’s not sure time is playing by the rules, stopping and starting at its own behest. Still - Eren’s carefree grin dissolves into a frown.

 

“Listen, just because no-one wants your tired showtunes anymore - it’s not my fault they saw something better and took it.”

 

Jean sighs heavily, pinches the bridge of his nose, and then punches Eren square in _his_ nose.

 

Eren tumbles back into the crowd, taking down another man with him. Birds spin around his head and he doesn’t move for a second, dazed and disoriented. Jean shakes his fist where it tingles and Sasha laughs once, sprite and ridiculing.

 

“Serves you damn right!” she says, flipping him the bird. Eren groans, wiping his hand across his mouth and smearing blood from his nose across his chin.

 

“Fuck,” he grumbles, pathetically. Jean rolls his eyes and offers Eren a hand to pull him back to his feet, in place of an apology.

 

He gets an answering fist to his jaw instead, and it probably serves him right too.

 

Jean reels from the punch and Eren grins victoriously, even with blood smeared on his teeth. Jean shakes his head: _oh no you didn’t_ , and doesn’t even get a warning shout from Sasha before Eren barrels into him around the waist.

 

They stagger over someone’s feet, colliding into the back of two men in mobster suits, who shout angrily and shove them back, and it’s honestly ridiculous, something out of a Charlie Chaplin sketch: they squabble and scrabble and Jean yanks hard on Eren’s hair and Eren rams his elbow into Jean’s kidneys and Sasha is beside herself in laughter, doubled over at the middle.

 

A bystander might even be confused whether they were friends or not. Jean often shares the same sentiment, but there’s vodka in his blood and that makes him volatile, and if he can’t find someone to kiss, he’s going to find someone to fight, in that way men always do when they’ve been on the bottle.

 

Eren grabs him by the bowtie and jerks him forward; he coughs, slapping Eren on the arm to let go, resorting to pinching him on the nose when that doesn’t work. Eren slaps him away and Jean seizes the chance to grab him in a headlock, but a well-placed kick to his feet has him blindly falling forwards, his sense of balance knocked to the wind.

 

“Jean, the pool-!” Sasha shouts, but no-one hears.

 

Eren shoves him hard in the chest and as Jean stumbles back, his foot goes straight over the edge of the swimming pool. He reaches out for Eren, grabbing him by the shirt collar just as Connie appears out of nowhere and tackles Eren around the waist with somewhat of a battle cry - and then all three of them careen into the water with a mighty splash.

 

Jean surfaces with a lungful of water, spluttering and gagging, but it’s not deep and his feet find the floor. The crowd around the pool are clapping and cheering, pouring bottles of champagne into the water and laughing like mad men. Gold streamers spiral from the sky, flotsam and jetsam on the water’s surface, ribbons of light; glitter sticks to Jean’s hands, a second skin. The taste in his mouth is a distinct mix of chlorine and prosecco. Jean coughs and smears his wet hair back against his scalp, and then someone jeers loudly as Eren surfaces, flailing his arms like a drowning dog. He’s pulled immediately under again by Connie leaping upon his shoulders, kicking and splashing, a broad grin splitting his face.

 

“You show him, Connie!” Sasha shouts from the poolside, but she’s smiling too, punching the air with her fist, and when Eren manages to break the surface again, it dissolves into who can give each other the most violent noogie.

 

Jean shakes his head despairing, but finds himself smiling too, wry and exasperated. He hacks up another mouthful of water and wades over to the far edge, his heavy clothes plastered to his body and making it feel like he’s trying to walk through treacle. He grabs the outstretched hand, and lets himself be yanked up onto the poolside, his bowtie floppy, suit sticking to his skin, and a puddle of water rapidly collecting at his feet, before sneezing violently, his brain shooting out his nose.

 

Everyone is laughing - a man knocks Jean on the shoulder with his fest in jest (“nice one, old boy!”), and a girl with a silver cloche leans it to press a smeary, messy kiss on his cheek - and Jean can’t deny the buzz that he feels beneath his skin, winding him up like clockwork, a heady rush, a _thrill_ not unlike all the alcohol in his blood being set alight with the flick of a lighter.

 

Across the water, Sasha is beside herself in laughter as she helps Connie out of the water by his drenched collar, and Eren is beaming, treading-water and draping himself in those golden streamers that float like oil on the surface. Jean grins, all toothy and crooked, and is about to turn to the thank the person who pulled him out of the pool when five fingers push into his back, right at the base of his spine. Jean’s breath is pushed out of his throat, and he turns to look up into dark eyes and a face full of freckles, still brimming with the same intensity as they had across the body of a piano.

 

A smile is half-blooming on the stranger’s face.

 

“Evening,” he says, low.

 

“Eve- ... evening,” Jean replies, bewildered. The man’s face is close to his, so much so that they could share breath, if they wanted; a signal flare goes off inside Jean’s head. He feels those strange fingers leaving an imprint on his skin. He’s drunk and he knows it. “Do I-”

 

_Why does it feel like I know you?_

 

The band on the stage in the middle of the pool is playing raucous, rampant and rolling, the conductor staggering sideways into the arms of a double bass. It’s deafening, but Jean hears the pound of blood beating in his ears.

 

A firework erupts overhead, exploding in a fountain of gold and silver. The crowd thunders and the ground rumbles with the trampling of a thousand excited feet. Jean is caught in a stupor.

 

“Are you alright?” asks the stranger with a magnanimous smile.

 

“I-  am I alrigh- yeah. Yeah,” he says. His clothes are sodden and soaking, but his skin feels red hot, its epicentre in the small of his back. He looks the stranger up and down, taking in his oddly drab choice of suit. He frowns. It’s not quite right. “Sorry, I - _thank you_.”

 

Words stick in Jean’s throat and he has to force them out. He doesn’t know why, but also knows _exactly why_ , because he’s always had a weakness for handsome men with dancing eyes.

 

He’s too drunk for this; the pool did nothing to sober him up. The lightning tension in his belly is still there, not quenched by laying a fist to Eren’s nose - it stirs still, like a summer storm, threatening in its promise to derail him.

 

He’s going to say something to regret. It’s going to sound something like: _can I buy you a drink?_

 

“Jean? Jean, you sap,” comes a booming voice. He turns and the crowd parts for a tall, blond man in a suit that seems to be trying its damndest to rip free of his biceps. “That was a stunt and a half, old boy!”

 

“Reiner,” Jean greets, extending a hand, but Reiner gobbles him up in a hug. They’re not this familiar with one another, but Reiner stinks of beer and doesn’t seem to care, even if Jean’s clothes are soaking wet.

 

“There’s a couple rooms upstairs I saw,” Reiner then announces, his voice booming over the crowd. “Go up and get dry - and find me after, yeah? Me and you are goingto talk business!"

 

Reiner claps him on the back a little too hard - it’s probably going to bruise in the morning - and then wanders back into the chaos with bellowing laughter. Jean watches him go, every other man Reiner’s immediate friend, whether they know each other or not, but then -

 

Jean whips his head around, but his stranger has melted back into the crowd, a phantom in dream colours yet again. He’s nowhere to be seen. This is becoming a reoccurring thing. The aftermath of fireworks is a flurry all around him, falling like stars falling like rain; the air shimmers.

 

Maybe it wasn’t real. He needs another drink. Stat.

 

* * *

 

**ELEVENFIFTEEN**

 

Jean stands at the window in a trance. The music is soft, even the fast beat and ardent piano made incorporeal by the hearing of it through thick oak walls and heavy doors. There’s always something strangely other-wordly about hearing a party from another room; it makes Jean wistful; it slows him down; he remembers how to breathe deeply again.

 

He fingers have stilled on the button of his waistcoat, still damp, but no longer dripping pool water. He has a half-glass of whiskey resting on the dressing table, a quiet companion.

 

Intangible desire is strung through the sapphired air; the light of the city reflecting off the water of the bay casts the room in something ghostly blue. He looks out upon the shoreline where happy couples are kissing in the sand and people stagger through the ebb and flow of shallow waves, waving beer bottles and singing songs reminiscent of war-time victories.

 

Another firework coppers the smog-laden sky. The spark only lasts a second, but all the people down below are enraptured for a minute that descends into decades; all their faces turn to the sky, and Jean finds it all quite beautiful.

 

Reality bends to the whim of alcohol, rippling around the edges, a mirage. He reaches for the window frame as though it might escape him if he did not. _Couldn’t he just step out into the midnight air?_ Perhaps this is what the city looks like from the rafters of the Singer Tower in Lower Manhattan, small and bustling and lit up in euphoric colour; perhaps it is the true city seen for the first time; perhaps that is what it takes to finally see how small his part in the world must be.

 

He wonders if any strangers are looking up at him from the beach and admiring him through the tall and imposing windows, another nobody.

 

Is he lonely? He’s not sure he knows anymore. He’s not sure he’s fully _himself_ anymore, just a figment or a fragment of the sober man who started the night, a caricature, an actor, Hell-bent on pretending he’s having a terrible time.

 

He is nobody. Nobody who matters, moving through the night without consequence. There’s a thrill to be found in that, he realises, feeling a tingle in his fingertips. Nothing that happens here is real; it stops when the sun comes up and disappears into the recesses of a fever dream to be looked back fondly upon but never talked about again. There are many names that will go down in history, but none of them are his.

 

He’s another nobody seeking another no-strings-attached night. It might not be a terrible thing.

 

* * *

 

**TWELVE'O'SIX**

 

It’s just gone midnight, but Jean’s lost all sense of time, and he’s swaying as he leans against the bar, and the man from across the piano is at the other end with these _I want to buy you a drink_ sorta eyes.

 

He doesn’t know where the others are - he lost them after the pool, last heard Connie cackling as he tore off into the house, last saw Sasha swinging around a banister as Reiner swung his arm around Jean’s sodden shoulders and dragged him up the stairs. Ymir’s not even here anymore - she’s probably off chasing pretty actresses, her smile sharp and devilish - and the bar is swarming with people climbing overboard to steal bottles for themselves.

 

Jean curls his fingers around the edge of the counter until his knuckles go white, but everything still swims. He glances up again, out of the corner of his eye, and the man with the freckles finds himself caught, ducking his gaze with what Jean imagines is a flush.

 

Jean grins, a little crookedly, a little messily.

 

So they’re not quite _I want to buy you a drink_ sorta eyes, he decides. Not when the man is intermittently chewing on his lip, and running his finger around the rim of his glass, playing a soft, tentative note lost to the clamour all around him.

 

Jean laughs to himself, stealing a tall glass of something sparkling from under the nose of a man who has turned away to feed lines to a pretty woman. Jean slams it back, and, licking the last drops from his lips, pushes away from the bar and into the crowd.

 

The man sees him coming, of course. His eyes lock onto Jean in a moment, wide and intense, following him as he waves his way through the throng of clamouring bodies.

 

“Hello again,” Jean greets, his smile too bright for this sort of meeting. His sober self would tell him to reign it back, but champagne fizzles in his belly, edging him on. “What are you drinking?”

 

The man reaches for his glass almost a little too fast and Jean finds it endearing.

 

“Uh -” he says, considering the dredges of alcohol at the bottom. “It might be scotch.”

 

“Hm,” Jean hums. He leans into the bar, weaseling in between this man and another. He feels the man’s eyes skating up his back and it sends something scampering up and down his spine. There’s still no bartender, so Jean leans over and grabs the first bottle he can wrap his fingers around.

 

“Are you a bourbon man?” he asks, inspecting the bottle.

 

“I can be,” says the man. The crowd has them pushed close together and Jean is not blind to the dusting of colour on the man’s cheeks. It’s enticing, Jean thinks, this paradox between the bashful and the bold that balances on this stranger’s shoulders.

 

“Well, alright then,” says Jean, grabbing two glasses. The bourbon splashes out the sides, droplets splattering across the bar and across the knuckles of the man as he leans there. He considers it for a moment, but then brings his fingers to his lips, quickly licking away the alcohol.

 

Jean’s response is a laugh, low and damning. He hands the man his drink, and holds his own aloft for a cheers. The clink of their glasses is lost to the music’s cadence.

 

“I’ve never heard someone play piano the way you play,” says the man then, taking a sip. His eyes meet Jean’s over the rim of his glass.

 

“You’ve never heard jazz?” Jean asks with a scoff that hides the flutter in his chest.

 

“No, no,” the man laughs, embarrassed. “I’ve heard jazz, I just mean - just not the way you play it. It’s amazing.”

 

“Thanks,” Jean murmurs, “Wish everyone else felt that way. You should see our bookings lately. Pretty fucking terrible.”

 

“It’s their loss,” says the man, coy. “You have a talent. I doubt many people can do what you do.”

 

Jean snorts into his bourbon, running his tongue over his teeth as he smiles.

 

“You really _haven’t_ heard jazz before,” he chuckles, “You been to any of the bars between forty-fifth and fifty-second? ‘Cus us mediocre pianists are a dime a dozen over there.”

 

“It’s, uh - not really my scene,” says the man. “There are speakeasies on fifty-second? Right next to the police precinct?”

 

Jean laughs.

 

“Oh, yeah,” he grins, sarcastic. “I’d say there’s a couple. Doesn’t mean any of them will hire me though.”

 

“Is that what you do, then? You’re a musician?”

 

“Debatably,” Jean laughs again, deprecating. “I don’t know. I play piano. Sometimes I get paid for it. Probably not enough, but -”

 

“But?”

 

“It’s a naive dream. I’ve had enough of fooling myself,” he says, but his voice is not his own. It sounds too serious, too serious for here and now, too serious for the inebriated man that he has become. It speaks of reality, not welcome here. “You can’t go on being a musician forever, turns out.”

 

Jean sighs heavily, reaching for his drink. He brings it to his lips but doesn’t take a sip. The smell alone is enough to goad the truth from his loose lips.

“But God,” he continues, “It’s addicting. Right now, right at this moment? I don’t think I can give it up.”

 

“So don’t.”

 

The stranger’s gaze is unrelenting and Jean finds himself made a little nervous, his shadow shrinking. He knows better than to listen to words that will be forgotten come the morning, but there’s sincerity there and Jean has been wandering through the city with little direction for a long time; he will gladly cling to anything that sounds like certainty.

 

“You don’t know me,” Jean tries to reason, a little soft, something of a wry smile on his lips. He can’t meet the man’s eyes, so he looks down, focusing on the slope of the man’s chest.

 

“I think I might want to,” says the man. Jean’s smile broadens and he’s unable to help himself. His cheeks colour. He still doesn’t meet the man’s eyes but reckons he knows what he would see there. “You play piano like there isn’t a single wrong note. It’s _free_.”

 

 _Free_ , Jean scoffs. There’s that word again: free. Ironically, it seems to haunt him, a ball and chain around his ankle as a shackle. Every person in this room, in this house, in this city that insists its blood is jazz but lies through its teeth, longs to be free, and Jean doubts any of them truly are.

 

Jazz isn’t that freedom; jazz is the longing thereafter. It embodies all that is wanted and needed but never granted.

 

Jean doesn’t know how to say all that without music.

 

“Trust me,” he murmurs, “There’s a whole lot of wrong notes.”

 

“Is that not the point?” asks the man. “I mean - I can’t say I know an awful lot about music, but is the point of jazz not the imperfection of it all?”

 

“You’re pretty eloquent for a drunk man,” Jean smiles dryly. “I best be careful of that, or I’m gonna be taken for a ride, huh?”

 

“Somehow it’s easier to be truthful in places like this.”

 

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

 

Something flashes in the stranger's eyes that seems daring. His lips curl into a private smile as he swirls his bourbon in his glass.

 

“Perhaps.”

 

Jean is drawn to that single word like iron to a magnet, inexplicable and seductive.

 

 _Perhaps_. Perhaps is not a certainty, and Jean has long been a black and white man. Perhaps opens up the door to consequence. Perhaps is unpredictable.

 

It should terrify him, and yet - he finds himself taking one step closer to the stranger and the extravagant chaos around them fades out into the background.

 

Perhaps is not something a nobody with nothing and no prospects should be teasing, but Jean is a man with dexterous hands and a need to please.

 

He wets his lips. The man’s eyes home in on the flick of Jean’s tongue. The air is suddenly thick, viscous with sweet liquor and stale beer and the way the desire to fuck and to bleed always blends into one when alcohol is involved.

 

“I saw another piano upstairs,” says the man. His voice is a little rough. Maybe he doesn't do _things like this_ often, just like he doesn’t frequent jazz bars often. Maybe he’s not who he usually is, either, another cocktail of truth and lies and blurred lines, just like Jean. “Maybe you could - play a little something.”

 

“What are you going to give me in return?” Jean says. Another step closer. The man seems to suck in a breath. “I don’t play for free. Bad business.”

 

There’s magic in the air and they’re both bound by it: the spell is in the shimmer of pale gold light dancing before Jean’s eyes; in the haunting boom of a pipe organ; in the intoxicating chance to pretend to be what you’re not.

 

It’s in the collision of two strangers, both alone in the centre of an extravagant party and both seeking a cure for that very aloneness.

 

The stranger worries his lip; he shrugs; Jean thinks about kissing. He misses the feel of a warm and pliant mouth against his, and the surge of forgetfulness that always follows. He doesn’t get to act upon it.

 

He’s almost taken out by a bottle of vodka that is thrust into his face. The transient moment shatters and whatever was pooling in his gut disapparates like cigarette smoke.

 

“Hey, watch it -” he starts, but it’s a familiar face that he turns to see, brandishing the bottle like a blind man’s stick through the crowd to find their way. Sasha.

 

“Jean!” she croons, “Found you!” She grabs him by the wrist and begins to tug, but he pulls back, not willing to budge.

 

“ _Sash-_ ” he stresses.

 

“Come on, Jean! Ymir has a surprise for us! Come on!” she continues, oblivious, “ _Fuck_ \- where did Connie and Eren go, they were right behind me -”

 

She tugs him harder and he stumbles forward, the bourbon in his glass spilling out over his hand and shirt cuff, staining it ochre brown. The crowd absorbs them, gobbling them up, and when Jean looks back, the anchor of the bar is gone.

 

* * *

 

**TWELVETWENTYONE**

 

“A boat,” Jean says, slurring his words. He sips again at his drink, decidedly unimpressed. “Where, dare I ask, did you acquire a boat?”

 

“Listen, Jean,” Ymir says, slapping him on the shoulder and swaying significantly. She has this wild sort of cocaine glint in her eyes, a little out of control. “You ask too many questions. Time to clam up.”

 

The boat moored to the dock is something sleek and fast and expensive; Sasha and Connie are already onboard, a giggling mess, spewing secrets into each other’s ears with reckless abandon. Eren, too, is there, apparently their friend again for all the drunken logic they now possess, the blood on his nose crusted over and his hand held out as he helps Krista onto the boat, who still sparkles in a mass of white jewels and feathers beneath the moonlight.

 

“I’m not sure if I’m impressed at the lengths you go to or not,” Jean remarks, tilting his head towards Krista as she laughs prettily at Eren nearly tumbling overboard. “Or just horrified.”

 

Ymir elbows him in the side with an impish grin.

 

“Impressed,” she says, “Always impressed.”

 

They both climb aboard with little grace, Jean almost pitching forward into Connie’s lap amidst raucous laughter, and then Eren is insisting that he take the wheel, and they’re all too drunk to protest otherwise. The boat spits and stammers, but then the engine roars, and the lurch forward rips the mooring rope from the dock that they forgot to unhook and Jean is flattened against his seat.

 

Sasha and Krista both screech with delight, Ymir seizing her chance to wrap a devious arm around Krista’s pale, slender shoulders. Connie hoots, throwing his hands in the air, and the boat tears into the water, shooting like a star away from the shoreline bathed in the light of the impossible house.

 

Jean still has his glass in his hand, and so he tips the last drops of bourbon down his throat, knowing he’ll need it. Sasha battles with a bottle of vodka in her lap, resorting to unscrewing the cap with her teeth, which she spits overboard, the vodka sloshes out across her dress. The fierce burn of ethanol mixes with the stench of salt water and it makes Jean woozy, almost losing his balance as Eren spins the wheel of the boat fast, hitting a shallow wave side on, water splashing up high over the starboard side, soaking all of them.

 

“Eren, you dumb Dora!” Ymir snaps, but it’s mostly lost to loud and brackish laughter from everyone else. Eren’s grin is delirious and unapologetic, and so when Sasha offers her bottle to Jean, he snatches it and chugs a good mouthful that burns like nothing else.

 

He gags when he swallows and he scrunches his face up as he passes the bottle blindly to the next person. He feels the warm heat taking root in his chest almost immediately, spreading outwards like poison through his blood that he welcomes with open arms. His head spins on an axis of inebriation; the world slips away into oblivion. He laughs for no real reason other than that he wants to.

 

The night spins out in concentric circles into a cacophony of colour, smears of blue and navy black pitted with dashes of starlight and flashes of green from across the bay, dizzy, disorienting, _divine_. Jean tips his head back against the seat, staring up at the night sky as it tumbles and tantalizes; the wind is cold and sharp at his throat, and yet a propane fire burns something hot and sweltering in his forehead. The boat makes a sharp turn; north could be upwards now, for all he rightly knows, the points of the compass thrown overboard.

 

Sasha’s fingers tighten around his hand but he’s not sure when she took it; her palm is sweaty as she leans into his space. Diamante around her neck catches as fragments in his eyes, crystalline; she presses her open mouth to Jean’s lips and drops a pill onto his tongue that fizzes. She tastes like alcohol and the glacé cherries hooked over the rims of plateaued glasses, provocateurs in sugar coats.

 

“ _Swallow_.” Her lips move but he can’t hear the words. She’s popping another white pill onto her tongue and turning to Connie now, lips on lips, skin on skin, his hand slinking up the back of her dress, fingers picking at the lines of her stockings. Jean swallows, and he feels the bob of it all the way down his throat, imagines it like fingers pressing into his sternum, electric.

 

Ymir caws with laughter. The white jewels on Krista’s dress catch the light jiving on the shoreline, scattering shards of moonlight across the deck of the boat. Jean’s head begins to buzz; he feels like someone running their fingers up the piano keys of his bones, starting soft, but getting faster, louder, _crazier_ \- and it keeps getting louder, until it’s not piano any more, but laughter, stratospheric and smeared until it hardly sounds like laughter anymore, just noise.

 

Jean’s head clunks back against the back of the boat again. The world accelerates into dream colour. He closes his eyes, but everything still exists behind his eyelids, just blurred and distant. The boat keeps getting faster. The muffled music keeps getting louder. Overhead, a bottle rocket explodes into a shower of gold and crimson red, and everyone hoots, like dogs barking at the moon.

 

Faster, still.

 

No-one in human history could have travelled this fast before. He feels like he’s going to circumnavigate the world over, in one dizzying, hedonistic rush of pleasure.

 

* * *

 

**ONE'O'FIVE**

 

He can hear his own heartbeat; he can taste his own heartbeat, he’s sure of it, the roundness, the fullness of it, sitting heavy on his tongue. His tongue is too clumsy for his mouth. Words need to spill out, but he has nowhere to put them. His fingers tingle with untapped rhythm - someone fetch him a piano.

 

Sasha’s laugh is like a diamond somewhere in the distance, stumbling over shoes scattered in the sand of the beach, dangling from Connie’s arm like expensive jewelry. They’re too far ahead now; Jean’s not going to catch up. They’re disappearing into the bassline, into the sepia-soaked splendour, into the strobe lights that flash and pulse and make jazz come alive in the dark.  

 

Jean flops down in the sand, all long and uncoordinated limbs, but this ghost of a laugh on his lips, endlessly amused at his own clumsiness. Even the sand is soaked with liquor, and he grabs a fistful of it in his palm, and flings the clump into the gently lapping waves that lick coquettishly at the shore. Across the bay, pricks of amber light and white luminescence where the sky and distant city mix and blur on the twinkling horizon.

 

Space stares down at Jean with its eyebrows raised, waiting to see what he might do, who he might become.

 

He flops onto his back, raises his hand to the sky, tries to fish the moon itself out from between the stars with his thumb and index finger. No such luck; he laughs again, all loose-limbed and boneless.  

 

The croon of a saxophone blares out from the house, brassy and brazen and it’s a solo Jean knows. It must be Eren, all that hot air in his lungs making the notes he blows too hard and demanding. The song ricochets through Jean’s veins, vibrating arterial walls and muscle and stardust bones; his head spins like the ferris wheel at Coney Island, around and around and around, and he laughs at himself again, arms spread eagle on the sand.

 

There’s champagne and whispers on his breath, and the bitter aftertaste of Sasha’s opiate kiss, euphoric and dysphoric all the same. The fever in his forehead is beginning to cool; he longs for the kiss of a stranger to heat it back up again; he wants to chase that high.

 

Footsteps crunching in the sand. Jean tilts his head back, craning his throat, and sees the world from upside down; fireworks erupt from the roof of the world and spiral downwards, into a sea made of stars, and from the ceiling, the man in the drab suit approaches with a crooked, but hopeful smile.

 

“You again,” Jean says, still upside down. He’s not sure if his words are slurring, mixed like a martini in some drug-soaked stupor. His stranger still smiles; Jean must be amusing enough, whatever he might be babbling.

 

“You look like you could use a drink,” says the man, his smile all shades of coy. Jean likes that; he likes the way the light dances in the man’s eyes, and he likes the way quirks frame his lips like quotation marks, and he likes _most_ the way his breath seems to simmer in his chest in something like anticipation.  

 

“I’m blind as it is,” Jean grins. He struggles to sit up in the sand, if only to emphasise his point. The world shimmies and sways; he blinks heavily to try and right it, and must look like a deer caught in headlights.

 

The stranger laughs something musical, and Jean is caught by the melody of it all, some perfect ad lib to the man wringing the saxophone far and away beyond Jean’s realm of thought. He drops down into the sand next to Jean, and it’s all Jean can do to follow him with his eyes, fixating on the fine slope of the stranger’s shoulders, on the broad muscle straining at the fashionless suit, on his strong and freckled hands curled protectively around two glasses of whiskey on the rocks.

 

“‘S’at for me?” Jean murmurs, nodding at the glass closest. The stranger laughs, breathily, and holds out the crystal tumbler in front of Jean’s nose. He seizes it with greedy hands, not missing the hot flush of the stranger’s skin against his own. “Huh. My hero.”

 

“Only for the second time tonight,” says the stranger, “I’m keeping a tab.”

 

“You be wanting _cash or check_?”

 

Jean meets the man’s eyes, and his grin curls at the heavy pink colour saturating the man’s cheeks. He runs his tongue along the front line of his teeth, a flash; the man follows it with the slightest flicker of his gaze. There’s pressure at the base of Jean’s throat that feels like there’s a pill gone and lodged in his sternum, and God, _he likes it_. He likes it, and he’s too far gone to care that he likes it.

 

“I’m only screwing,” Jean says, slow and deliberate. He cocks his head a little; the stranger swallows thickly. “Looks like the bank’s closed. You’ll have to catch me later, Mister -”

 

“Bodt,” says the stranger, almost too quick. Jean lifts his whiskey to his lips and takes a long, drawn-out sip. “Marco Bodt.”

 

“Well alright, Marco Bodt.” Jean holds out his hand, casually sloshing whiskey over his chest in the process. He snorts, unable to truly care. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance. I’m Jean.”

 

“Jean? Just Jean?”

 

“For tonight? Yeah. Just Jean.”

 

Marco hums, musing on something Jean is not privy to. There’s a curious look in Marco’s eyes that makes Jean wonder what he looks like when he falls in love.

 

“Cigarette?” Jean offers, feeling around for his pack in his breast pocket. There are three left, turned upside down for good luck, and he offers Marco one of them.

 

“Thanks,” says Marco, inhaling deeply as Jean offers a light. The flame dances deliriously: its shallows, yellow-gold like the grand chandeliers that hang in the house, triumphs of Art Deco; its depths, deep, dark blue, like the water of the bay cloaked in night, lapping softly at the shore with slow hisses. Jean is mesmerised for a moment, but not more so than when Marco first puff of smoke licks along his jawline. “What have you been doing?”

 

There’s a way Marco ahs with his words that feels not-quite-right. Surreal, in a way Jean cannot possibly describe. He’s reminded of stories his mother used to tell before she passed, from a time before she came to America: of _leanan sídhe_ , the fairy who takes a human lover, the beautiful muse who offers inspiration to an artist in exchange for their love and devotion - and madness too.

 

There’s a part of him that would welcome it. He takes another sip of the whiskey.

 

“Out on the water,” he replies. His voice drops low; his eyes fix on the cigarette between Marco’s lips and the quietly-burning embers at its tip. “Someone - someone had a boat. Found a boat. I’m not sure.”

 

“Who did you go with?”

 

“Careful now,” Jean warns. He returns his eyes to the water and reclines back in the sand on his elbows. “Don’t push it. You’re awful interested in my business, there. Someone might think you’re a cop or a dick. In both senses of the words.”

 

“I’m not a cop,” Marco replies, a little too quickly. Jean rolls his eyes and smiles ruefully.

 

“Didn’t say you were.” He holds his hand out for the cigarette, and Marco stares at his fingers puzzled for a second, a pleasant blush high in his cheeks. “But my business isn’t all that interesting. I’m a pianist. Pianists don’t get involved in interesting things. Butt me?”

 

Marco passes the cigarette over and Jean takes a long draught, his eyes on Marco’s not wavering. It almost feels too intimate a thing, sharing a cigarette in the dark, Jean’s lips where Marco’s were, the cigarette still a little damp from his mouth. They’ve only just learned each other’s names. It feels like they’re skipping steps.

 

He lets the smoke escape slowly from his mouth, tendrils of white cloud clinging to his lower lip and circling the tip of his nose. Marco’s blush is darker. Jean wonders if he’s seen right through him.

 

“So,” he continues, passing the cigarette back. “What _is_ a fellow like you doing in a joint like this? Besides being terribly interested in who i choose to spend my time with?”

 

“A fellow like me?”

 

Jean gestures up and down at Marco’s suit and raises his eyebrows, expectantly.

 

“Well, sir,” he teases, “You’re quite clearly not from money. And I would recognise a face like _that_ , so you’re not an actor either, or a musician, I’d guess. You’ve denied being a cop, so I will do you the courtesy of believing you, despite the fact you and I both well know that there’s alcohol flying around this place when it shouldn’t be and there’s undoubtedly a whole bunch of people in there with ties to the mob. So that either makes you a crasher or - well. A mystery.”

 

“I think I’d prefer to be a mystery.”

 

“So that means you’re a crasher, then. Probably the most serious crasher I’ve ever met, but. Still a crasher.”

 

There’s a pause, and then they both laugh, and Jean may be drunk, but he’s not too drunk to notice the giddiness in Marco’s broad grin. Bright lights parade across his face, casting deep shadows beneath his eyelashes and along the line of his nose; in profile, his face is beautiful. Jean is unabashed in his admiration. Heat rises up the back of his neck, eager for more.

 

A muse indeed.

 

He slumps back into the sand with a loud hum. Hands sprawled out in the sand, he grabs a fistful and lets the grains trickle through his palm. The stars above are shrouded by the orange glow of the city in the distance, New York’s smog having the audacity to believe it deserves the sky more.

 

“Well, Marco,” Jean says, pointedly, “You and me both.”

 

“I thought you said you have an invite?”

 

“Oh, I do,” Jean says. He pats at his jacket, feeling for the outline of the piece of card he tucked away earlier, but he’s not quite sure his head is connected to his fingertips, and instead his hand just falls flat across his breast. “Don’t ask me how, mind. I’m not sure I could explain.”

 

“You feel out of place?”

 

Jean chances a glance up at Marco, curious. The shadow of a reassuring smile lingers on his lips, but he’s not laughing anymore.

 

“Yeah,” Jean says, slow. “Yeah, that’s it. A funny old thing how you can feel so alone at such a large party. Not sure if I belong here anymore.”

 

Effervescent laughter rings out somewhere over their shoulders - a pretty flapper girl giddy over the drunken joke of her arm candy for the night, no doubt. Marco turns his head to look, and Jean studies the sharp line that his jaw cuts, eyes trickling down to the bob of his Adam’s apple against the collar of his dress shirt. He knows he’s going to regret this in the morning; he’s looking too long, and he can’t excuse it all to drunkenness.  

 

When Marco turns back, the laughter of the flapper girl and her friends has infected him, and it shines in his eyes, tipsy and contagious. Jean can feel a grumble brewing in his throat, pushing its way through the haze that smothers him - but he suffocates it as he tosses the last drops of whiskey down his throat, almost longing for the burn that would accompany it for more sober men.

 

“I don’t know about that, Jean,” he says. The way he says Jean’s name is so _familiar_ , with all the camaraderie of old friends and all the fondness of dark-room lovers, and it unsettles him. Something stirs in his gut and he knows it as want. He shifts his hips uncomfortably in the sand.

 

“You seem to be in your element to me.”

 

“If my element is cigarettes and panther piss whiskey, then sure,” Jean scoffs, “Not grand parties like this, though.”

 

Marco looks like he wants to say something, words poignant on his tongue. He’s got that look in his eyes again, the same one from the bar when he waxed lyrical about Jean’s dexterity with a piano, that makes Jean feel like he’s the only man who exists in the world. It’s an impossible feeling, and yet, he still feels it.

 

He feels important. He feels - he feels like there’s no-one else at this party Marco would rather see. It makes something tighten in his chest.

 

Jean doesn’t know how to ask what he wants to ask. He feels like he already knows the answer, but it’s not a question one can just go about asking in good society. He’s not a betting man.

 

_Are you a three-letter sorta guy?_

 

He doesn’t get to ask.

 

“Kirschtein!”

 

Jean cranes his head back on the sand to see Ymir marching towards him, a stagger in her steps and not an ounce of decorum in the way she grasps a beer bottle and takes a mighty swig from it. Marco’s reaction is strange: the openness about him seems to slip away and he curls around the cigarette in his hands, protectively.

 

 _Maybe he is a cop_ , Jean considers. _And Ymir is a criminal._

 

It makes him smile, but he doesn’t want Ymir to see.

 

“Don’t shout, I can hear you fine,” he says. “What do you want?” _You’re interrupting._

 

“Up! On your feet! There’s someone I need you to meet,” she insists, stabbing at the air with her bottle. “And your trumpeter is drunk off his face, so I need you to sort that out too. Come on!”

 

“I’m quite fine here,” he says, and he tries to pretend it’s because of the high he’s riding, whatever Sasha kissed him with on the boat working its pen yen magic. It’s mostly a lie, of course.

 

“When I say there’s someone you need to meet, what I’m actually saying is: there’s someone you’re going to meet,” she says, stern. It’s at that moment that she seems to notice Marco. “Oh. _Oh_.”

 

“What?” Jean frowns, but Ymir’s not listening to him. Her grin is back: the wolfish, predatory one that is forever up to no good.

 

“Who’s this?” she asks, sly. “Not a face I’ve seen before.”

 

“Marco,” says Marco, holding his cigarette between his lips and extending a hand. Ymir shakes it once, firm, her eyebrows raised. “And you?”

 

“No-one of consequence,” Ymir replies, “At least, not tonight. Them the rules.” She throws a sidelong look at Jean, endlessly amused. “Seems Jean isn’t playing though.”

 

Jean scrambles to his feet, unwilling to let this stretch out any longer and more excruciatingly painful. He almost falls flat on his face in the sand because he legs don’t quite work as he remembers.

 

“Alright!” he says, “I’m up, I’m up - who do you want me to meet?” he grabs her by the wrists and whirls her around so that she’s facing back towards the house again. There’s something in his chest that’s tightly-wound, eager and curious in equal amounts. Dangerous, too.

 

Ymir’s right. He’s breaking the rules. He’s meant to be no-one.

 

“I’ll see you around, Marco,” Jean calls back over his shoulder, “Thanks for the drink.”

 

Marco lifts his glass in a toast, his smile soft. There’s a knowing look in his eyes; he shares a secret with Jean, and it makes him feel good. A warmth blooms inside Jean’s chest.

 

* * *

 

**ONEFIFTYSIX**

 

It takes them a long while to meander through the house - there are too many people on the dance floor, too many people shoulder-to-shoulder doing the Charleston, too many people that Ymir somehow knows by name. She talks to them all, wolfish laughter in between sips of her beer, which becomes a martini glass somewhere along the line and Jean’s not really sure when that happened. She keeps a hand clamped down on his shoulder, preventing him from darting away into the crowd and making a run for it.

 

For someone so openly hostile, Jean might be surprised Ymir has so many friends if he could think straight, but he can’t, so it doesn’t really matter. Someone’s playing a song he likes, going to town on the piano, and he’s humming along and tapping his foot and seeing colours in the air that can’t really be there.

 

“What the _Hell_ did Sasha give you?” Ymir says in his ear, loud to be heard over the crowd that jostles them about. She has his elbow now and is guiding him towards some large oak doors at the side of the room and her breath smells like absinthe and ethanol. “You’re not even here anymore, Jesus Christ.”

 

He doesn’t know what it was - laudanum, perhaps - but he can still taste it on his tongue, can still imagine it fizzing in his gut, can still feel it rummaging through his veins. He snorts, not sure why he’s laughing; Ymir rolls her eyes and drags him forwards, slipping through a crack in the doors.

 

The room is magnificent, clad in enormous paintings of gilded, gold leaf frames, depicting epic snapshots of soldiers on horseback in the throes of war, back when war was still noble and heroic and worth writing songs about - but Ymir doesn’t stop, yanking Jean forward by the cuff of his sleeve through another set of doors, and then another, until Jean is not sure he knows left from right, let alone where they’ve come from or where they’re going.

 

She stops outside the fifth - or is it sixth? - set of doors and knocks. Jean squints at her knuckles as they rap upon the wood, finding himself fascinated, although he’s not sure exactly why. His whole body still feels like it’s humming, untapped energy vibrating at his fingertips and begging to spurt from his fingertips.  

 

A tall man in a sharp black suit opens the door - he seems familiar somehow, and Jean is sure his sober self might even know this man with his dark features and large nose and skittering eyes - and he nods at Ymir, glances both ways around the room, and then lets them in.

 

A lungful of acrid smoke greets Jean and he can’t stifle the cough. The air is thick with the smell of tobacco and cigars, rich and dark; embers glow in between fingers amidst the smog and low, severe conversation is the music in the air. Jean scowls; he wants to go back to the piano in the other room - whatever is going on here is far too serious for his opiate euphoria. The vibe is too quiet here, and he doesn’t like the sudden headrush of being able to hear his own thoughts. He wants to go and find that man again - Marco, _Marco Bodt_ \- and share another glass of whiskey or two and admire the look in his eyes that Jean just cannot place, but finds immeasurable.

He grunts, turning to Ymir, about to tug his arm free of her grip, when he hears his name yelled far too loudly.

 

“Jean! Old boy!”

 

Connie comes bounding over, his bowtie undone around his neck and his shirt tails untucked. He waves a half-drunk bottle of liquor at Jean, almost staggering into Jean’s arms.

 

Jean detangles himself from Ymir just in time to catch him beneath the arms, although he doubts he has enough control over his own legs to keep them both afloat.

 

“See you’ve been making friends,” Ymir grins, nodding over to a group of men in the remnants of sharp suits having quiet conversations on the rocks. “Jean, there’s a couple fellas I want you to meet.”

 

She tries to pull him forward again, but Jean’s having none of it.

 

“I’m too drunk, Ymir,” he whines, still clinging onto Connie, who may or may not be drooling on his shoulder now. Ymir fixes him with a flat look.

 

“Jean, there are club guys here,” she whispers, conspiratorial. “Y’know, guys who own bars that may or may not be looking to hire down-on-their-luck jazz pianists at the recommendation of a far-too-nice friend.”

 

“If you’re the far-too-nice friend, I am _definitely_ too drunk,” Jean replies. He heaves Connie a little more upright and that seems to shake the back into him; he shoves away from Jean, and shouts something indistinguishable, careening off into the smoke. Jean watches him go, but then his eyes fall on a pair of of suits in the corner of the room, fingers clasped in a handshake, the tell-tale outline of a wad of cash sitting pretty in the breast pocket of one of the men’s blazers.

 

“What’s going on here?” Jean frowns. “Who are these guys?”

 

Ymir slings her arm around his shoulders and knocks her head against his with a sly grin.

 

“Told you there was something going on tonight,” she says, “There’s a big run of liquor coming down from Boston at the end of the week. Good money stuff. Lots to spill about.”

 

Jean looks again at the two men who were shaking hands, now more clearly a business deal that has them sitting pretty in prohibition. That’s the other thing the room stinks of, besides smoke: _money_. And not wrinkled Abes and jangling change - it’s the crisp yet sleazy smell of new money, stacks of fifties tucked seamlessly into jacket pockets and laughed over like they’re nothing.

 

His attention is drawn away as Reiner appears in front of them, having dragged himself away from false laughter and fake slaps-on-the-back. He still looks tidy, almost bulging out of his suit, but no more ruffled that when Jean last saw him. He smiles something a little more genuine for them both, but it’s still a smile greedy and self-assured. He must’ve struck gold tonight; he wears the look of a man who has made a tidy profit and wants everyone to know about it without them having to ask.

 

“Just the fella I wanted to see,” he grins, broad. “Your singer has been making a right impression on the boys, I must say.”

 

“Sasha’s here?” Jean asks, trying to crane his head around Reiner’s enormous bulk to find her. He sees her in the throws of conversation with a crowd of good-looking men, all lapping up her laughter with heads thrown back, gushing over her effortless charisma like moths to a flame. It’s truly a gift how she can attract people to herself like a beacon in every room.

 

She looks like a star: ruffled and rumpled and not quite perfect, but glowing. The spotlight is a stage she was made for, and Jean, for her shadow.

 

It’s not that he’s jealous. He loves her too much for that. It’s more - it’s more that he wants what she has: the confidence. The ease. The steadfast resolution that this is what she must do and what she must be, a happy-go-lucky fool.

 

Being a fool is so easy.

 

“There’s a piano with your name on,” says Reiner, nodding to a beautiful black Steinway embossed with gold lacquer. The piano stool sits unoccupied, a bait that knows full-well it’s a bait. “And a microphone with hers on it, so it seems. She says you’re quite good.”

 

“Oh, _quite_ good,” Jean jibes. “That’s kind of her.”

 

“We’ve got a lot of business to talk tonight,” Reiner continues, regardless. “A little music wouldn’t go amiss.”

 

Jean glances back to the piano and chews on his lip. There’s not really a decision to be made, but he tries to look as if he’s making one. His eyes are still half on Sasha’s sparkling silhouette, her second skin of faux diamonds catching the low light, rippling like water.

 

“Alright,” he says. Reiner slaps him hard between the shoulder blades, making him cough.

 

“Attaboy! Excellent! Ymir - there’s a bar in the back corner with your name on it too, fi you’d be so inclined.” He grins like a schoolboy and Ymir rolls her eyes, trying for despairing, but achieving reluctantly fond.

 

“Fine,” she stresses, “But only because you know I make the best fucking martini this side of the Hudson.”

 

They both wander off, Ymir ribbing Reiner, and Reiner laughing a belly laugh. Jean is left alone in the middle of the room; he plucks a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lights up, welcoming the taste of cheaper tobacco in his throat. The piano taunts him from the back of the room, goading him with play-me eyes, buy-me-a-drink-eyes, fuck-me eyes.

 

He’s seen that look already tonight. He smiles to himself as he rolls up the sleeves of his shirt and make a beeline for the piano stool.

 

He’s not sure how it’s possible, but this piano is more beautiful than the one out by the pool - it’s bigger and it’s prouder, dripping in sleek elegance and noble power. Jean imagines flipping out coat tails as he takes a seat in front of its keys and takes a moment to introduce himself to the instrument: he has good manners, and you don’t take a woman to bed until you’ve offered her your name - or at least a strong drink.

 

His fingers hover just above the keys and he imagines the piano shiver, her skin prickling with goosebumps. It’s an intimate thing, and Jean feels it deep in his belly.

 

“What are we playing?” comes Sasha’s voice, slurred and giddy as she sweeps around the side of the piano, draping herself across the black gloss. There’s a golden microphone in her gloved hand, and the way her fingers twist and curl around it is almost lewd. A spark stirs in her dazed eyes; her smile is the sort that would make men grovel at her feet and asked to be walked upon.

 

Jean huffs, bringing his fingers down hard on the piano keys; the chord he plays is less a whimper and more a moan. Somewhere near the back of the room, Reiner cheers, loud and boisterous.

 

“Anything you like,” says Jean. “Let’s make something up.”

 

“How iconoclastic of you, my darling,” Sasha purrs, “I love it.”

 

* * *

 

**THREETHIRTY**

 

The piano dances beneath Jean’s idling fingers, alive and crooning and meandering aimlessly through chords and melodies. The air is thick with it, dripping with the comedown of a high, the soft jazz slow and syrupy. He’s been sat here for a while now, and people and come and gone again; Jean lingers, alone. Reiner and Ymir slipped away a while ago and Sasha’s microphone lies abandoned on the back of the piano, in favour of a group of flyboys who offered to buy her a drink.

 

No matter. The piano won’t let him leave yet; she hasn’t had her fill of him and Jean is obliged to honour her wishes and be a good lay.

 

He sways a little on the piano stool, fingers missing a note and striking another. No-one in the room seems to notice; he plays on, waywardly. He’s a traveller, a visitor in the night, just passing through. A one-night stand. There’s a couple in the corner, his mouth on her throat, her dress to far up her thigh; Jean focuses on playing their song, finding notes for his hand disappearing up her skirt and for her quiet whisperings in his ear and for the cloak of drunkenness that shields them from prying eyes, the sound lifting and rising from the gulley of the piano.

 

Jean’s fingers caress the piano keys in a dream, moving without really meaning to move. His mind goes nowhere, encompassed in that feeling of waking in the early morning, just a breath before the sun, but you’re not really awake yet, just clinging to the threshold this side of sleep, shrouded in unreality. His vision clouds; distantly, through heavy wooden doors, trumpets shout and a woman makes love to a microphone where everyone can see, but here, it’s muffled, and Jean is the composer.

 

He doesn’t write the song; there are no notes on the page; that’s not how jazz works. But - he feels it, and the notes curl around his fingertips, minims brushing against his skin, semiquavers hopping along the line of his knuckles, playful and coy. It flows without much thought, some sort of sultry illusion that doesn’t seem quite right when one looks too close, doesn’t make much sense when one actively tries to listen.  

 

It attracts love all the same, some siren call in the solitary song of a piano. Or - not love, but lust at least; but the slip of bare breasts where the bodice of a dress is tugged down; but idle hands that will be nothing save a drunken memory come the morning. The tell-tale sound of someone chasing a different sort of high mingles with the piano, low and breathy moans, and Jean plays to match, a soft crescendo that peaks and dies with pretty chords.

 

Light scatters through crystal chandeliers and souls ache, and Jean feels far, far away from this place, submerged somewhere deep in the night.

 

The door creaks open, and a thin slither of light cuts a sharp line through the haze. The couple in the corner doesn’t even notice, but Jean glances up at the shadow illuminated from behind by the remnants of the party.

 

The shadow looms, stretching long across the floor; Jean cracks a smile, fingers stilling as a chord rings out long and dying.

 

“You again,” he says, the corner of his lips twisting up something crooked. “This is getting predictable.”

 

“I heard the piano,” says Marco, stepping into the smokier light. His hands are deep in his pockets and his shoulders are dropped and he carries himself with all the charm of a man whose edges have been softened by a fine sheen of liquid courage. A pinkness colours his cheeks rosy and his expression is a little dazed, not quite all there. Jean feels much the same.

 

“A siren call,” he murmurs, soft. He drags a finger down the length of the keys, and feels Marco’s eyes give a lazy chase. “That, or you’re following me.”

 

“Can we put it down to coincidence?”

 

“Can you?”

 

Jean looks up from beneath his eyelashes to meet Marco’s eyes; the look is sharp, too sharp for this smokey room, and Marco cannot hold his gaze long, blushing and looking away with a gentle cough. He’s a beautiful man, Jean reiterates to himself, and captivating in a way that could leave him fascinated for hours, trying fathomlessly to figure out why it is he cannot understand who he is looking at, or why it is that this man feels so— so _not here_ , as if fallen out of another time and place.

 

“I suppose not,” Marco says, bashful. Then, curious, he adds, “Do you believe in fate?”

 

“I can’t say I do,” Jean shrugs, “Can’t put much faith in things like fate when life hands you the shitty sorts of hands it doles out to me. You think this-” He gestures vaguely between them both. “This - tonight - is fate?”

 

“I’ve never heard someone play the way you play before, so I think it might be.”

 

Jean wants to make another clever remark about how Marco could wonder into any old speakeasy in midtown and hear any old pianist just like Jean whittling down the ivories; there are more jazz bars in Manhattan than Jean can count, and that’s probably one of the reasons jobs are so thin on the ground, he notes.

 

But he doesn’t say it. He wants to put himself down, like he always does; sober up on good and boring intentions; insist that he’s no better than anybody else.

 

But he doesn’t say it. He can’t. Somehow, in this illusion of a moment, it just doesn’t seem quite true.

 

The veil of reality is thin here, and there’s some dream slipping through the cracks, pure fantasy. There’s a passing thought, a curiosity, as to whether Jean’s hand might pass right through Marco if he were to reach out and touch with shaking, trembling fingers.

 

There’s magic in the piano tonight: his magic. He knows this. There’s a stranger standing before him with whom he wants to share all the wonders of the universe - or at least all the wonders of a bottle of vodka and a night dripping in diamonds.

 

He swallows thickly, and stands slowly from the piano stool. He shuts the lid, but no-one else in the room looks up, too engrossed in the dizzying friction of skin on skin.

 

“Is there somewhere,” Jean asks slowly, “That isn’t here?”

 

Marco’s tongue flicks out across his lips, followed by the spread of a lazy smile. Jean doesn’t know why he said that, but he’s long since lost the filter on his mouth; instead, his heart pounds, the back of his neck growing too warm to be comfortable, and it all feels far too intimate, even when there are men with hands up ladies’ skirts and women dragging lipstick smears over the chins of desperate gentlemen in the very same room, and all Jean is doing is staring at this man in the off-season suit.

 

“Where … do you have in mind?” Marco asks, and Jean wonders if he imagines the low note in his voice. His toes curl in his shoes; he doesn’t have an answer to that.

 

There’s a spark, Jean imagines, tearing off into the night, that he’s going to follow. Maybe it’s his _something more_. Maybe it’s not.

 

The only thing that seems to matter is finding out.

 

* * *

 

**THREEFIFTYEIGHT**

 

Marco’s fingers trail along the bannister of the staircase, and Jean watches from the corner of his eyes, transfixed. A lone saxophone howls at the moon beyond the great glass windows, drunk on love, sultry and haunting.

 

Two pretty girls come tumbling down the stairs, loose-lipped and light on their ankles, bumping into the wall and giggling behind well-ringed hands; neither of them spare a second glance at Jean. He steps to the side to let them past, and his fingers brushes against Marco’s.

 

Jean’s breath catches. He glances up and finds Marco’s eyes, twinkling, somehow amused; he offers a shrug: _no big deal_. Jean’s lips twitch at the corners, a barely-there smile.

 

This magnetism again. There’s a hook lodged below one of Jean’s ribs, the line tangled around his bones, and he can feel it tugging, someone on the other end reeling him in. He tries to pull back, just to test the elasticity, the snap-back, the current guiding him up the stairs, but his head is too far gone, and his feet won’t do as he wants.

 

The grandfather clock at the top of the stairs chimes out when they reach it: one, two, three, four, each strike more lethargic than those before, the echo dragging out, ringing around the hallway. The world exists on a cusp, just one chime away from retrograde.

 

“It’s late,” Jean comments, for no real reason. He feels drenched in unreality, the sort that only seeps beneath doors and throw cracks in windows at such a time of night, when the cloak of the world has been lifted and nothing is as it seems.

 

The landing is deserted, but the air is still charged; it prickles at Jean’s skin, pulling hairs. Music from downstairs hums faintly in the walls, deconstructed and suspended in almosts. It’s not how Jean would play it, but perhaps that’s the beauty of it all.

 

 _Slow it down_ , Jean still thinks. _Slow it right down_.

 

Marco stops in front of the clock and looks at it for a long while, his hands sliding into his pockets. The light is low and long shadows bleed into one another.

 

Jean wants to stretch this moment out until it’s as thin as it can go. A hum appears at the back of his throat, appreciative. Marco looks back over his shoulder with a smile that would melt hearts in daylight. Fortunately for Jean, nothing that happens in the dark has to be real.

 

* * *

 

**FOUR'O'EIGHT**

 

They find themselves in a circular room, somewhere high up in a turret, looking out across the bay. People are scattered across the beach, basking in the green light that flashes on and off from a mansion on the opposite shoreline. Jean makes for the window, caught by the hypnosis.

 

“Do you know who owns this house?” Jean asks, unable to tear his eyes away from the world beyond. He’s aware, implicitly, of Marco somewhere behind him, wandering around the room, slowly dragging his fingers over mahogany, his shoes clicking on the hardwood floor.

 

“No, not at all,” says Marco. Jean hums.

 

“I wouldn’t be surprised if no-one lives here,” he says. “Y’hear all these stories, passed around like moonshine or what have you, but no two ever seem to be the same.”

 

“Maybe it’s a hoax,” Marco shrugs, “Designed to trap people like you and me.”

 

“It’s like a dream,” Jean replies, soft. “None of it feels real.”

 

Marco scoffs, light, and Jean hears the smile on his lips when he talks next, a little teasing.

 

“You’re half under, are you surprised?”

 

Jean turns on his heels, fixing Marco with a flat look. Marco stops in the middle of the room; the green light flashes beyond the window, casting roaming shadows across his face.

 

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

 

There’s uncertainty on the back of Jean’s tongue, and it tastes like skee and opium. He doesn’t feel fully present, like he’s forgotten how to inhabit his body and he’s floating somewhere above, up amongst crystal chandeliers that glint and tinkle in the shifting light.

 

“Look at this,” Marco says then, turning to the grand oak cabinet at his side. He unlocks the latch with clumsy fingers, and reaches inside for something sparkling.

 

“What are you doing?” Jean asks with a frown as Marco’s hands come away dripping with white jewels on a fine chain. “That’s not yours.”

 

“It might not even be anyone’s,” Marco says with a sly smile. He tilts his head in a _come here_ gesture, and Jean’s fading drunkenness obliges. “Try it?”

 

Jean has tried his fair share of jewelry in his time: he’s been dressed up by the girls at the club after particularly good shows before, feathers and lipstick prints to match their pearls looped around his neck. Sasha, too, has a fondness for sharing her wardrobe in the safety of their own home.

 

This doesn’t feel dangerous - it can’t, because they’re no-one and they’re nowhere - but it feels like a risk, a risk for which Jean has no name. He steps closer to Marco, toe-to-toe, and undoes the bowtie around his neck, pulling it from beneath his shirt collar and tossing it to the ground.

 

He tilts his chin up, exposing his neck. Heat drowns him, out he pushes through it, chasing the remnants of the high that is quickly disintegrating into sleepfulness.

 

“Go on then,” he says, and Marco stills, for a moment. Emerald light is fickle in the air between them.  

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Marco hooks the necklace over Jean’s head and it catches on his ears and it looks a little bit ridiculous, even in the state he’s in. Especially in the state he’s in, he reasons.

 

“Looks good,” says Marco, using his pointer finger to straighten out Jean’s shirt collar. Jean cannot help his crooked smile. “Shall we see what else we can find?”

 

An enormous wardrobe sprawls up the back wall, dark oak wood, all brooding and imposing. There’s a balcony halfway up, and Marco makes a beeline for the ladder, laughing softly to himself when his foot misses the first rung.

 

“Watch it,” Jean says under his breath, eyes dropping low on Marco’s back, trailing over the shape of his hips beneath his soft linen slacks. Marco climbs up to the mezzanine, swaying a little in his steps, his shoulders loose and mellow. Jean thinks he would look good with something in his hand: a cigarette, a glass of whiskey, a distinctly lonely man.

 

There are shirt on display in the wardrobe, fine shirts, silk shirts, beautiful shirts that would take Jean years of saving to afford. He doesn’t suppose a single one of the nickels in his pocket has ever seen a shirt like these.

Marco pulls open one of the drawers, the note on his lips appreciative. Jean’s finger fiddle with the cascade of jewelry about his throat, but he can’t drag his eyes away from Marco. Not until -

 

A shirt hits him square in the face, and Jean yelps, overwhelmed by the lungful of well-perfumed clothes turned slightly musty, stumbling over a steps backwards.

 

“Fuck! Hey!”

 

Marco leans over the bannister, arms folded and smile impetuous. He has a silk scarf draped over one shoulder, and another in his hands, thumbing at the fabric. The contrast against his daudy suit is curious, not quite right, and Jean wonders if that’s proof enough he’s part of this fantasy too, just another aspect of the ilusion. He can’t put a finger on it now, but you never can, in a dream; you never realise what’s wrong until after you wake up.

 

Jean’s smile is rueful.

 

“Do you think Mr Smith will mind you looking through his stuff?”

 

“Mr Smith?”

 

“The guy who owns this house, whoever he is!” Jean grins, “Mr Smith.”

 

“Mr Smith,” Marco agrees with a smile of his own. “Of course.” He tosses the scarf in his hand towards Jean; it lands at his feet, a gentle flutter. Another follows, catching on an invisible breeze, weaving this way and that. The green light passes by again, passing through the fine fabric like smoke, softening the harsh colour.

 

There’s some magic at work here, and it’s whimsical. Jean’s eyes follow the scarf all the way to the ground. Marco turns back to the wardrobe and gathers a massive pile of clothes in his arms and Jean doesn’t feel worried. His eyes aren’t flicking back to the door and waiting for a stranger to walk in: he’s _with_ the stranger.

 

He takes the necklace off as another silk shift drifts down onto his shoulder; it’s so light, he can barely feel it. Soon, they’re falling like leaves from the mezzanine, wistful and lilting, not buoyed by the same gravity that wants for Jean’s knees to hit the floor at the feet of this man and his magnetic smile.

 

There’s heat pooling in his gut; he cannot ignore it. It’s a tension, a stilited breath, an itch for a cigarette to help sooth fraying nerves.

 

No. No, not nerves. He isn’t nervous. He’s just -

 

Waiting.

 

 _Wanting_.

 

Jean doesn’t know what he wants.

 

“Flannel, indian cotton, linen,” Marco grins, flinging shirt after shirt wide across the room, raining down on Jean. “I don’t even know _what_ this one is!”

There’s brightness in his eyes and dimples around his grin, and when he laughs it’s truly free - and for the briefest flash of the green light roaming across the room once more, Jean might be jealous, because it’s the sort of free the rest of them have been chasing all their damn lives.  

 

“You’re going to have to refold every single one them,” Jean laughs, low. “You’ll ruin them.”

 

“What’s to ruin?” Marco asks, “Too much money than sense. It won’t be missed.”

 

There’s this clarity, this transparency in Marco’s eyes that only comes with inebriation, as if all reservations and inhibitions have been scrubbed clean. He speaks with honesty, as if the thought of a filter on his words is not even on the table.

 

Jean wonders if Marco’s been done over by the decade too. He wonders if all the promise of prosperity and success was little more than ash at the end of a cigarette. He wonders if there’s a dream Marco is trying hard to leave behind, for want of something better, for want of _want to live_ and not just … to scrape the barrel and survive.

 

He can’t tell by the look in Marco’s eyes, and that throws Jean. He feels off-balance and it’s not because of alcohol.

 

God. It’s just … not real. None of it. It doesn’t make sense.

 

This man doesn’t make sense. Jean doesn’t understand why he’s here. Jean likes him.

 

“Jean?” Marco asks from above. There’s a note of concern in his voice of which Jean is fond. “Are you good?”

 

“I’m good,” Jean says, lowering himself to the floor. He sits amidst the pile of discarded clothes and pats down his pockets for a cigarette but comes up empty. He sighs. “Just - confused.”

 

“Confused? About what?”

 

“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s real. And I don’t know what … what I want.”

 

“You don’t know if you want to play jazz anymore?”

 

“I’m thinking it might be more than that.”

 

Marco’s expression changes, drifting to something more pensive. He seems to think deeply, eyes cast far away, out of the window and across the bay. The silence long enough that Jean isn’t sure if he’s trying gallantly to come with an answer, or if he’s just lost his train of thought to the haze of dope and whiskey.

 

Jean doesn’t expect an answer anyhow; he’s long past that point. Wanting things like jazz music or money in his pocket - those are material thing. They’re not enough. They’re never enough.

 

What he wants is more than that.

 

Perhaps it’s adventure. Perhaps it’s to leave a footprint on a world that is already a stomping ground for the rich and iconoclastic. Perhaps it’s something bigger and grander than his tiny corner of a life, so much more than he has that it’s just impossible to comprehend.

 

There has to be more than this. There has to be something.

 

“It’s a lie, isn’t it?” Jean asks then, “This? This place, these people? Some of these people, they go back to their day jobs where they cheat people out of money. Or they go back to waiting for another inevitable war. Or maybe they go back to not even being able to afford food on the table because - because all that matters to them is this. Whatever this is.”

 

“I don’t think it’s a lie,” Marco remarks, surprising Jean. “It’s an escape, but I don’t think it’s a lie.”

 

“What?”

 

“I think you’re allowed to have both,” he says, this shy, bashful smile playing on his lips. It’s private in a way, and Jean doesn’t know if it’s meant for him in full. “Both the dream and the reality.”

 

“Too much of one … hurts.”

 

“It certainly does,” Marco agrees. And then he adds, “But it’s a good dream, isn’t it?”

 

That surprises Jean again and he knows it must show on his face, wide eyes and gawp mouth. He’s never considered himself a man of halves - always an all-or-nothing sort of fellow, with a penchant for the nothing - but here he’s being offered a compromise on a silver platter, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

 

Perhaps it is. He knows he can be a bit of a sap at the best of times.

 

A crooked smile unfurls slowly on his lips, but he feels it. He feels it all the way down to his toes and it might be the only thing he’s felt all-night that he does not doubt is a concoction of drugs and alcohol. It has so much … clarity to it.

 

“I’d drink to that,” he says, “But I have no drink.”

 

Marco scoffs and throws another silk shirt over the railings, and then another, and another again - shirts and ties and embroidered robes, anything he can get his hands on. Clothes are scattered all across the floor and there’s a pile building up around Jean’s feet. The circadian hum of music from floors below still vibrates in the floorboards; the energy in the room shifts, minutely.

 

Jean is laughing, light and breathy, as he pulls a fine silk from his head, his hair standing all up on end. The air is pricked with something orgastic now, and it’s making Jean’s blood begin to stir.

 

Marco tosses one last shirt to the floor and then slides back down the ladder with ease - although he sways a little when his feet meet the ground. He shoots Jean a look over his shoulder that is both giddy and bashful, and when their eyes meet, the green light through the window might as well be iridescent.

 

Marco’s cheeks are reddened and he looks exquisite in his dress shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, suspenders taught against the shape of his chest. Jean knows he’s grinning, eyes ablaze and unashamed, fixed on Marco’s face as he approaches Jean amidst the pile of clothes and drops to his knees before him. Their gazes aline, and the green light passes like the wandering searchlight of a lighthouse across Marco’s face again.

 

Jean lets his fingertips brush Marco’s first, but it’s Marco’s hands that smooth up Jean’s biceps until Jean shivers.

 

“I still owe you for that drink earlier,” Jean says, a half-whisper, his voice low and gravelly. He can’t look away. “Did you say you wanted cash or check?”

 

Marco’s eyes duck to Jean’s lips.

 

“Cash,” he says, breathlessly.

 

And it’s not sudden, but it’s all-encompassing, the sweeping kiss. Marco has him by the arms, fingers pressing into his jacket, and pulls Jean towards him with more fervour than a drunk man should possess. They separate on impact, the first kiss too much teeth and alcohol, but close the gap quick, Marco sighing into Jean’s mouth.

 

Jean drags a palm over the side of Marco’s neck, and the skin burns, on fire, red-hot to the touch. The underside of Marco’s jaw is prickled with creeping morning stubble, and Jean feels it shoot straight to his belly, where something disorienting swirls.  He pulls away just a moment, just enough to let his fingers trace the sharp cut of Maroc’s jaw, the pliance in his cheeks, the bow-shape of his kiss-willing lips, just to tell himself it’s real.

 

He’s not sure that it is, but nothing this night has been sure-footed. It’s all a dream, and it’s a good dream, vibrant and hedonistic and transient, and Jean wants to grab it by the throat and steal its breath for his own.

 

His knees slip in the shiny, silken fabrics on the floor, and Marco seizes the chance to urge him backwards, the kiss growing insistent; Jean feels the desperate, scrabbling hands on his chest pressing him to lie back against the smell of heady perfume and moth-worn dresses. A low, stifled note is stolen from his throat; it sounds something like a groan, deep-seated and debauched.

 

Jean has kissed strangers before - he’s shared more pecks on the lips than he can count whilst seated on the stool of his piano at closing time, a reward for working hard and playing harder, getting lost in the music, making people come alive, _all that jazz_. He’s kissed men and women and he enjoys them both; he’s shared taxi cabs home with three-letter men that tingle with tension unbroken until they’re safely behind closed doors and breathing into each others mouths; he’s fantasised about sneaking away into the backroom between sets at the bar to steal something quick and frantic and heated.

 

But never like this. He’s never shared a night like this before, never drowned in this sort of delirium before, where he’s lost all track of which way is up and cannot find it within himself to care. This is not another petty theft, this is not quick - this is slow and swallowing, and Marco’s mouth holds his body down like music, pinning it against the ground, enraptured. The green light from across the bay is haemorrhaging from everywhere at once, and Jean is bleeding out this longing onto the hardwood floor, a slow and rapturous death.

 

He curls his arm around the back of Marco’s neck and drags him down, pulls him closer, _drown with me so slow and scintillating in whatever magic has taken over us tonight_.

 

_I don’t know who you are, and I shouldn’t want to know._

 

It’s a risk, and he knows it. They ought to fuck right here on the floor, amidst the pile of scarves and expensive shirts. Those are the rules for this sort of thing, for having your way with a stranger, for submitting yourself to a loss of control. Those are the rules for Jean’s last night of freedom; it’s how they remain no-one and nowhere and nothing.

 

“There’s a bed,” Jean rasps. Marco kisses his jaw messily, but is methodical where he starts undoing the buttons of Jean’s shirt. He murmurs a low note of agreement, a little rough, and once Jean’s shirt and suspenders are pushed from his shoulders, Marco tugs him to his feet.

 

The flush of alcohol spreads up his sternum, all the way to the hollow of his chest, and when Jean falls back onto the bed, Marco stands for a moment at his feet, and admires it. Jean is greedy for it.

 

He started this night with his reality held at a rigid arm’s length, and now he’s gathering it up, clawing it to his chest.

 

He wants to say: _I didn’t come here for this. I didn’t intend for the night to end this way_ , but the words are lodged in his throat, pushed down by some ragged gasp that follows Marco’s mouth as he discovers every inch of bare skin as clothes are slowly peeled away. It would be a lie anyway.

 

He wanted something. He came here for something. Something bigger, something grander, something more than he had curled up in armchair in his shitty apartment, or bent over a run-down piano playing ragtime to a crowd that won’t tip.

 

He has _made this_ something.

 

* * *

 

**FIVEEIGHTEEN**

 

The blur between where the twinkling of the distant city ends and the stars start is enchanting, and the sky is not dark and black without character – it is a deeper blue, stirring with something of a dawn, and the starscape a whimsical swirl of freckled constellations that Jean finds himself loving: bulbs of light line the horizon that make him dizzy and forget how much of a dream is a dream.

 

New York has softened around its edges; laughter is gentle and trickling and still a little drunk, carefree and decadent. Glasses tinkle onto the floor where they’re nudged off tables by loose and swaying hips. The people who pass him by are beginning to long for their own beds, or are searching for somewhere the party is still alive and kicking, chatter about taking a car into the city reaching Jean’s ears.  

 

A cigarette hangs from Jean’s lips, glowing softly, tendrils of smoke licking at the corners of his mouth, half turned-up in a satisfied smile. He feels all loose-limbed and boneless, a gentle hum in his temples; he pushes away from the wall he’s leant against and he feels the pressure of a headache beginning to brew.

 

There are drunk and beautiful people passed out around the swimming pool, hands trailing in water busy with broken bottles. Loose beads from broken necklaces crunch beneath Jean’s shoes as he makes his way around the water's’ edge; the piano on the stage in the centre of the pool is covered in a coat of empty champagne bottles and the butts of extinguished cigarettes. Its ebony colour is smeared and marked and the lid is lying crooked across the strings, but it looks well-fucked, post-coital in a way that has Jean smirking as he lets a hand stray across the keys, the other flicking the end of his cigarette into the pool.

 

The sky is split with blue and tangerine, and the sun, moments away from breaking the horizon, hesitates just below the bay, just to give Jean a second longer to dawdle in the twilight.

 

“Jean!” someone calls from over his shoulder, voice rough and tattered. He glances back, and it’s Ymir at the bottom of the staircase leading up into the house, her arm slung around her pretty Hollywood doll. She’s lost her waistcoat, but gained some poor fellow’s suspenders, and there’s a half-finished bottle of whiskey hanging loose between her fingers. Krista’s white dress is near translucent against her pale skin, shimmering in the low light, and her long eyelashes cast feathered shadows against her cheeks, angelic. There’s not a hair out of place on her head but there’s pinkness in her cheeks brought about by whiskey-laid kisses, no doubt. At the top of the stairs Bert and Reiner are loitering like a couple of cads, jackets slung over shoulders, bowties unraveled, and cigarettes wagging in quiet conversation as they wait for the others.

 

Jean plays a few notes on the piano; all of them are out of tune, but there’s a charm to that. He smiles softly to himself again.

 

“We’re heading to the drum on twenty-third and fourth,” Ymir continues, thrusting her half-finished bottle in his direction. “You want to join? Space in the hayburner for one more and the night is still young.”

 

The thought of cramming into the back of a stranger’s car for a petting party and hurtling into the city for another drink or five in some speakeasy still packed to bursting with bodies hustling makes _Jean’s_ body ache. He’s still riding his high and he wants to avoid a puncture for as long as possible. If he leaves this place, he supposes the dream will end and that reality exists beyond the gates at the end of the road, unmoderated and unrepentant.

 

“It’s late and I’m no owl,” Jean replies, “Got a couple things to finish up here, then I’m off.”

 

“Couple things to finish up, huh?” Ymir grins, shark-like. She looks him up and down, pointedly; he knows his shirt tails are untucked, his shoes half-laced, and his top three buttons undone. He knows how it looks. Ymir _definitely_ knows how it looks. “You found that thing you were after then?”

 

He rolls his eyes, a blush rising up the back of his neck.

 

“Pipe down,” he warns, low, but there’s no heat to it. “Go on - screw. Sun’s coming up in a bit, you need to get going.”

 

“Let me know when you’re coming down my way next,” she grins, “Be seeing you, Jean! Have fun with your fella!”

 

He flips her the bird and she laughs, throwing her head back as she and Krista turn back to the stairs, and leave Jean with the piano and the burgeoning morning.

 

* * *

 

**SIX'O'CLOCK**

 

The sun bleeds across the bay, a highway of bronze and gold and vibrant orange across the water leading on into paradise. Jean finds himself transfixed by the dawn, the first moment of silence after a very long and winding night; his ears still feel tender, still ringing with the memory of Connie blasting his trumpet right up against Jean’s temple.

 

He rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet - and those ache too. His whole _body_ aches but there’s satisfaction to be found in it; in the grumble in his belly that longs for something solid and starchy; in the poppy bruises he knows scatter his hip bones and inside thighs.

 

He runs a hand across his jaw - it has begun to prickle - and then across the back of his neck, where he fingers find another telling bruise. He pokes and prods at it for a moment, fascinated by the ripples of dull pain that radiate down his throat with every press of his fingertips.

 

It will likely stick with him for a few days. It’s not going to vanish when he climbs into the back of a taxi cab home.

 

“Jean!”

 

He glances up at the sound of his name and finds Sasha at the top of the stairs, beaming broadly and waving, looking a little worse for wear but undoubtedly happy. Her makeup is smudged and her hair is ruined and her dress is rumpled and _she’s lost both shoes_ \- but the glow she has is one of someone who is still drunk and basking in the come down before the hangover.

 

Connie appears at her side, slinging an arm around her waist and pressing a kiss to her cheek as he escorts her down the stairs. Jean meets them at the bottom, already holding out his pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

 

“God, I’ve missed you, old boy,” Connie says, eager to take a long draught, visibly relaxing as smoke invades his lungs. He also looks like he’s had an intense night, with dark circle strung up beneath his eyes and more than a few new dents in the brass of his trumpet he still has a vice grip on, but whatever fire he was burning has been quenched, and he seems fulfilled.

 

“Where’d you run off to, Jean?” Sasha asks, nestling up to Jean as he slides an arm around her from the other side to keep her on her feet. “I was looking for you, but I was worried you’d run off home without us.”

 

“I was around,” Jean says, and they begin walking towards the front drive. There’s a taxi cab already waiting on the gravel, the driver perched on the hood and smoking a cigarette, which someone has apparently called for them. “I had to go an see a man about a dog. The man being Ymir. The dog being her _terrible_ moonshine.”

 

Sasha squints at him, a knowing smile curling her lips.

 

“I think you’re feeding me a line,” she says, teasing, “Look at the state of you.”

 

Jean shrugs, but knows he’s turning a little red in the tips of his ears.

 

“I wouldn’t want to give you the satisfaction, Sasha,” he replies.

 

“No, you wouldn’t,” she agrees, before pinching him in the side. “I told you you’d have fun. I told you.”

 

The make it to the taxi and Connie pulls a stack of bills from his pocket that he definitely didn’t have twelve hours ago. Jean focuses on opening the back door with one hand whilst not dropping Sasha, because her feet certainly aren’t working as they should be. She giggles at the pig’s ear he makes of it, but once she’s squished into the backseat, her head lolls back against the seat and she’s asleep in the blink of an eye.

 

Jean shakes his head fondly as he shuts the door on her. He takes a moment to himself to reorient, to allow the fuzzy, hazy world to right itself once more, still a little too keen on spinning for Jean’s liking. He hasn’t escaped the hangover and his temples are pulsing, and it almost feels like he’s taken a blow to the head for how dazed he is.

 

Squinting against the sun, he raises a hand to shield his eyes, looking back at the house. There are a couple of girls stumbling their way down the stairs, and a handful of stragglers just stirring in the sun and emerging from the wide windows thrown open to the morning air. The spell shivers, close to breaking.

 

He’s about to turn away again when he spots a figure standing alone at the top of the stairs, hands in pockets and shoulders relaxed, half in shadow as the enormous house shields him from most of the dawn light. A secretive smile is summoned to Jean’s lips. He raises a hand in a wave; Marco returns it in like.

 

He thinks he will write a song, after he’s slept off the night. And it will be a good song, for such is reward of dallying with men who may or may not be spirits. Sasha will sing it, and Connie will whistle on the trumpet, and maybe he will invite Eren too, for the melancholy lilt of a saxophone - but the piano will be the star of the show: it will rise and fall, chasing nonsensical highs and toying with allegro lows; it will tell the stroy of a one-night muse, of green lights and unmet lovers; it will blend the line between reality and the dream until all the world is an illusion.

 

 _It will be a good song._ The piano and him will have one last hurrah, before all is said and done.

 

“Come on, old boy,” Connie says, slapping Jean between the shoulder blades, “Time to get the missus home and get some shut eye. Providing I wasn’t roaring drunk, I do believe we have an audition later.”

 

“An audition?” Jean asks, half his attention with Connie, but the other half lingering at the top of the stairs. Marco is no longer there, vanished back into the house or into the air, Jean cannot rightly say.

 

“You still remember how to play the piano right?” Connie asks, looking Jean up and down pointedly. “Because I really talked you up to this fella I met at the bar -”

 

Connie swings his arm around Jean’s shoulders and together they climb into the back of the cab. For a man with a hangover, Connie has an awful lot to say, and so Jean nods, eyes drifting one last time to the house.

 

He supposes the incarnation must be complete.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for the read! let me know your thoughts in a comment below, and please leave a kudos.
> 
> Visit me on [Tumblr](http://the-prophet-lemonade.tumblr.com) for more similar nonsense. Inbox is always open and I take prompts! 
> 
> I'm also on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/bootheghost).
> 
> Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, folks! Got the final few chapter of Droplets on the horizon and then hopefully a handful of Malec. Thanks for all the support in 2017 - you guys, as always, are the best.


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